A note of caution: as a designer who depends on his system for his living, I have triple-redundant surge protectors on my computers, but recently had a ligtning strike take out my little LAN. It fried my router, two computers' ethernet ports, and the JetDirect card in my big color laser printer. Seems the strike ran in via the cable modem (which, the cable rep informed me, protects itself by passing any such surge on through!). Moral: even if you have the power circuitry well protected, use a Cat5 ethernet cable with an in-line fusible link as the final connection from your system to the cable, DSL, or whatever. If you're on a dial-up, invest in one of the surge protectors which provides protection for the phone line as well.