As a very cheap guy, (after all using free wordpress and a bare bones blog) I don’t like to spend money when I don’t have to (even before I lost my job), but there are two things that no person without a computer should be without.
#1. Thumb/Flash drive
When I saw my first thumb drive back when I worked for Telvista I thought it was the coolest thing since sliced bread. It is a first rate way to move individual files from one machine to another, when traveling it is a great way to transport pictures and or documents to a friends house and when hung around the neck of a small child in a large public place with a cell phone number in a file it can be a great safety measure as the kid can give it to a policeman or a person of authority if lost so you can be contacted. They are so inexpensive that there is almost no reason not to own one.
#2 External hard drive
The reason you own your computer is the data on it unless you are using it strictly as a game platform. That data needs to be backed up. You can use a program such as Carbonite which is first rate but requires an active internet connection and can take days to restore if you lose everything. An external hard drive will give you a method to restore data quickly without such a connection. These days since most system come with restore partitions the need to back up drivers is less pronounced but that doesn’t save the pictures etc. You can restore from an external hard drives in a fraction of the time that an off site backup takes, and if you have an off site backup such as Carbonite it makes an excellent plan B. Take this next sentence to heart: You can NEVER have too many backups As system hard drives increase in bases size external hard drives will do so as well. so you might want a new one every few years.
Put these high on your Christmas list if you don’t have them already.
Da Techguy's (no longer backup) Blog 