Comment Tech bench (Score 2, Informative) 530
Where I work there are 5 techs and everyone of course has a better idea.
First what will the owner or boss allow, if cost is an issue. 90% of everything on my bench I purchased, the bench it's self I found in a back room full of junk, pulled it out and came in on my own time and put togather.
My most important tool I feel is my data recovery system which is not more than a all in one Abit board mounted on a plywood board. Easy access to replace drives and even install pci cards if needed.
I can not tell you how many times a week I use it to recover and or backup data from a customers computer or scan for virus's. It is mounted on my bench, above and out of the way. I bought the board and got a used cpu from the many junk systems we get stuck with every year. I went with the KV-80 model which has onboard everything including SATA. It runs Windows 2000 Pro for the OS and has an 80 gig hard drive, with a usb external backup drive.
As for the rest of my tools, the usual diag Microscope 2000 and any other software I can find, multi meter, small set screw drivers
Bench has on monitor with a 4 port KVM switch.
Keyboard is mounter under the bench, so as to not take us space on the bench surface.
One of our techs is a wiz at making CD bootable diag disk.
I must admit, each bench here is different but each tech can work on 3 computers or more at a time, and it happens from time to time.
So you can imagine our benchs are much bigger than the one you have.