As to protection from surges, again the power supply sections handle moderately high surges routinely. There may be some occasion on which a surge protector(say about $20)might be of benefit on surges which couldn't be handled routinely but yet weren't so powerful(e.g., a near-direct lightning strike)as to make any protection useless. I use nothing of this sort either and as I've told my good friend Jack(Ajax)to his delight, if a lightning strike destroyed my equipment I'd view it as simply being God's way of telling me that it's time to upgrade.
Although most of the logic here i would agree with, this particular point i do not.
We had a quick brown out last week and 3 capacitors on my video card blew. That video card is sitting behind a stand alone power supply of quality and behind a Tripplite surge protector (not a UPS).
Now i'm out $250 to replace the card because the deductible on house insurance would logically require i lose at least $1000 in equipment before making any claim is of any gain to me.
Deductibles vary but ours happens to be $500.
Sometimes a little protection is worth the effort and cost. In my case, it didn't help much of anything last week, though i have blown out a surge protector in the past from a brown out and the computer was perfectly fine.
I think i'll be switching to a UPS for the home computer in the least in the near future.
