I saw a blog on the Brent Ozar website where his minimum spec for a quad core 2CPU box was 96GB RAM and 2xSSD drives. The charge of over-speccing the box was answered by saying that the cost of licencing SQL Server was the largest cost. The cost of the extra memory and SSD drives was paltry in comparison so why bother scrimping on these items?!?!?! You would lose more money in DBA time diagnosing and addressing memory constraints than you would save!

Similarly with the desktop. The biggest expense is the employees salary. The cost of a couple of decent monitors and some basic desktop tools is negligible in comparison.

My home setup has a single monitor and the stuff that comes with the developer edition of SQL2008.

My work setup has two really good monitors, laptop with SSD drive with 8GB RAM, Red-Gate tools etc. Having recently had my laptop replaced and finding the Red-Gate stuff absent, plus quite a chunk of my previous tools was quite debilitating. It didn't stop me working, it just stopped me working as well as I usually do.

Some of those tools allow me to multi-task more effectively.

Yes I can work without them but do an employer is getting less value for money from me. Just for clarity my work place is not removing the tools from me, its just an oversite in the hardware switchover process.