What else belongs with it

A cable right through the flat

The cheapest recommendation on this whole page and the one with the biggest effect. A Cat 6 cable costs a tenth of a mesh system and beats it in every respect.

Wireless shares the air with all your neighbours and fluctuates with the time of day. A cable does not. It delivers the same performance at eight in the evening as at three in the morning, and it does not drop out when someone switches on the microwave.

The objection always comes: nobody wants to run a cable through the flat. Understandable, but a flat cable under the skirting board or along the door frame is invisible after a week, and stick-on cable channels cost little. Even if you rent and are not allowed to drill, you can manage with that.

Cat 6 is enough for everything at home. Cat 7 and Cat 8 are marketing in a home setting: they are designed for transfer rates your connection does not deliver and your motherboard cannot handle.

If a cable really is not possible: mesh

A set of several stations that coordinate with each other, for example from AVM or TP-Link. Much better than a single extender, but still wireless.

A normal extender itself hangs on the wireless network and halves the rate in the process. A mesh set has its own channel for that and hands the device over cleanly from station to station as you move around.

What matters when buying: at least one station needs a real LAN port. Otherwise the PC ends up on wireless again after all, and half the point is gone.

We deliberately only mention powerline, networking over the power line, as a stopgap. It depends on the building's wiring, and you only find out whether it works after buying. In an old building with several circuits between the router and the room, the success rate is roughly half.

DisplayPort cable with VESA certification

For example from Club 3D or Lindy. The cheapest part that can hold back an expensive monitor, and the cause people look for last.

One DisplayPort cable looks like the next. The difference lies in the shielding and the cross-section of the wires, and it only shows when a lot of data goes through. At 1440p and 60 Hz any cable will do. At 1440p and 240 Hz, or with an OLED at a high frame rate, the poor ones start to flicker, show brief black screens or the device no longer wakes from sleep.

The tricky part: the fault is intermittent. You suspect the driver, the graphics card, the monitor, and at some point you swap parts worth several hundred euros. We have seen that more than once.

VESA keeps a list of certified cables. Take one from it and you have ruled out this source of errors once and for all. Look for DP80 or DP54 on the packaging, not for words like gaming or ultra. And take the shortest cable that reaches: every extra metre makes things harder, not easier.

Power strip with real surge protection

For example Brennenstuhl's Premium-Line. Costs about as much as two cinema tickets and stands between a lightning surge in the line and a PC costing four figures.

A strip with protection and one without look identical on the shelf. The difference is on the packaging, as a number in joules: that is the energy the component inside can absorb before it lets anything through. If there is no number, just the words surge protection, there is none.

Lightning does not have to strike the house for this. A strike nearby or a switching operation in the grid is enough. What arrives is a fraction of a second at many times the normal voltage, and the power supply passes it on to the motherboard.

Two things hardly anyone knows. The protective component wears out: after several events the strip no longer protects, but looks exactly the same. That is why there are strips with an indicator light, and they are worth the money. And the protection has to cover every path into the device, including the network or aerial cable. A surge takes whichever path is open.

External SSD, for example Samsung T7 or T9

Palm-sized, no power adapter, fast enough to work from directly. The backup you actually make, because it is no hassle.

The best backup is the one that happens. A network drive in the basement is technically superior and stops being set up after three weeks. An SSD that lies in the drawer and gets plugged in once a week saves more data than any concept nobody implements.

The sentence most people have never heard: a copy in the same room is not a backup. It helps against a broken drive, and that is the most common case. It does not help against burglary, water, fire or ransomware that takes everything that is plugged in at the time.

So the simple rule: two copies on two different devices, one of them outside the house. For private users that means in practice: the SSD at home, and the most important folders additionally in encrypted online storage. And only plug the SSD in while backing up, otherwise the ransomware encrypts it too.

To be honest about size: for the big archive of photos and videos, a classic hard drive is much cheaper per terabyte. The mix of a fast SSD for working data and a slower drive for the archive is almost always the more sensible purchase.

Electric duster instead of canned air

Buy once instead of buying again every year. Pays for itself after the third can and is the gentler tool too.

There is no air in a can of compressed air, but a liquefied propellant. As long as the can stays upright, gas comes out. Tilt it, and when blowing out a PC you tilt it all the time, and the liquid comes out too. It evaporates instantly and cools down so much that frost forms. Not something you want on a circuit board.

An electric duster does not have this problem, does not run empty and does not lose its power after half a minute.

Plus two things that together cost under ten euros: isopropyl alcohol from the pharmacy or DIY store and a few microfibre cloths. Isopropyl evaporates without residue and attacks neither paint nor coating. Household cleaner does both.

And the most important sentence in this whole section: hold the fans still while blowing them out. If a fan spins faster than it was built for because of the airflow, the motor works as a generator and sends voltage back into the motherboard. A finger on the blade is enough.