Give the gift of geekiness

This is it. The much awaited Annual Holiday Gift Guide for the Windows IT administrator in your life. OK, so maybe not so much awaited as tolerated every 12 months, but why quibble about semantics?

For those looking to give themselves a gift or to bestow their generosity on a fellow Windows network combatant, my top gift pick from 2004 would have to be a tablet running Windows XP Tablet PC Edition 2005 . When Senior Contributing Editor Brian Chee first started using it in the lab, I’ll admit I scoffed. But after watching it in use — from lab scenarios, to tight datacenter environments, to interviews at crowded Starbucks tables — I can’t argue with its versatility. Combine it with a reliable USB-to-serial converter, such as the one from Belkin F5U103 , and you’ll be able to Telnet with a stylus to even your oldest infrastructure.

I’d also wish for MOM (Microsoft Operations Manager) 2005. Anyone running five or more servers will benefit from this product — even if you need to take a half step down to MOM 2005 Workgroup Edition. No, it’s not cross-platform, and yes, we’ve certainly seen better hardware managers, but for those running an ever-changing landscape of Windows server products with ancillary vulnerability, patching, and upgrade considerations, the management packs that come with MOM are indispensable time-savers. As opposed to the learning curves you’ll eat for other Redmond products, munching down MOM 2005 know-how will actually save you time instead of simply watching it turn to steam.

On the hardware front, branch offices are still my biggest headache, and wireless is still my best defense against expenses and deadlines. And in that particular war, my best weapon is still Trapeze Networks’ RingMaster management suite. It’s fast and flexible (and getting even more flexible), and it allows me to manage any number of remote sites — even among disparate clients — from a single central console.

But all that gear gets stuffed into your corporate stocking. For putting under the tree in your living room, might I suggest cool storage. It’s cheap, always useful, and comes in a variety of new flavors. Freecom’s magnesium alloy USBCard Pro Flash drive, for example, holds 1GB of data on what looks like a credit card, which is great for fitting in your wallet, unless you spend a good deal of time sitting on it, like I do.

Another storage flavor is the external multimedia hard drive, such as the X-Bay being offered in Europe by SigmaTek. As does any other external USB 2.0 hard disk, the X-Bay runs 40GB and beyond; what differentiates it, however, is that it also comes equipped with an MPEG-4 decoder chip and even has a video-out port built into its external enclosure. So, if you’ve configured your SnapStream Beyond TV DVR to record DVDs, these drives are an excellent way to expand your video storage library or even take the cinema with you.

And speaking of Beyond TV, I’ve checked out TiVo, Microsoft’s Media Center, and several dish-based DVRs, but Beyond TV is still the most flexible personal video recorder I’ve seen. There are hurdles to jump through with HDTV, but for general television, DVDs, and home movies, nothing migrates movies to bits and bytes as easily as Beyond TV. And it even gives the geek in your life an excuse to build a cute, little shuttle PC that looks good in the living room AV rack. Next year, it might be Windows XP Media Center Edition, but this year Beyond TV gets my vote.

Let me know your cool toy picks for 2004, and maybe I’ll do a postmortem roundup after the white-bearded fat guy puts his reindeer away. In the meantime, best holiday wishes to everyone and thanks for reading.