Well, I was looking at some old circuit diagrams I´ve made (I was heavy into HiFi/HighEnd before I started with computers again), and there is a real nice way to protect your hardware from voltage peaks like from strokes of lightnings: Simply use a varistor and place it between the 2 poles of the power plug! A varistor costs just a couple of cents and protects your hardware FAR better than any normal fuse can do, simply by the fact that varistors react MUCH faster than a normal fuse. Which varistor to use depends on the voltage of your country, in germany it´s 240 volts, so I use a 250 volt varistor. What a varistor does? Pretty simple: It´s like a switch which reacts at a specified voltage, so a 250V varistor opens at 250 volts and so causes a short-circuit between the 2 poles of the power-plug, and this is done so fast that no voltage peaks will reach the hardware. Another big plus is that varistors have "self-healing"-abilities, this means that they still work after they reacted, but for safety reasons it´s better to replace them to make sure they work properly the next time....
