Gallery: Top 10 holiday gifts for the tech team

With the festive season looming, here are silicon.com's pick of the presents you might want to consider to keep your friendly local tech guy or gal on your side for another year.

Starting with a musical theme, Ion Audio's Contemporary iTTUSB turntable allows you to play old-style vinyl records and transfer them to MP3 format.

It uses software from Audacity to preserve the authentic record sound - complete with scratches - and works for LPs and singles.

Picture credit: Firebox.com

The first and second series of The IT Crowd, the hit comedy series about the joys of working in the tech department, is another good option for the square-eyed sysadmin.

Last year, silicon.com caught up with the show's writer and director, Graham Linehan, and found out what makes IT such a good source for comedy.

Picture credit: Amazon.co.uk

What about a classic game with a tech twist? Here's a USB hub which doubles as a pop-up Pirate game - handy for killing time while waiting for that system reboot.

Picture credit: Firebox.com

And harking back to the first computer games, you could try this rather nifty Space Invaders-inspired alarm clock to make sure tech support is up bright and early.

Picture credit: Firebox.com

Or if your tech team is more into plant life, this carnivorous plant set from DuneCraft could fit the bill. It comes complete with Venus Flytraps and makes a change from the Lara Croft posters adorning most techies' lairs.

Picture credit: ThinkGeek.com

For the techie with a love of all things green, there's always this wind-powered mobile phone charger.

Picture credit: Firebox.com

Star Wars is a perennial Christmas film favorite so a real life (almost) light sabre would be appropriate. These amazingly accurate weapons are made by Master Replicas and even make the same noise as in the films when you fire them up. Guaranteed to delight the techie who cowered in front of Darth Vader in their formative years and now fancies themselves as Hans Colo.

Picture credit: ThinkGeek.com

Harking back to cutting-edge 1980s television, you could treat your tech colleague to a radio-controlled version of Knight Rider's Kit - David Hasselhoff's not included.

Picture credit: Firebox.com

If you want to buy a more practical present this mini-laptop case from Case Logic might be the ticket. It also has a dedicated iPod pocket.

Picture credit: Case Logic

And if you're feeling particularly generous (or you haven't told them about that upcoming system overhaul) you could also treat your tech team to an Asus Eee PC 900 to put in the bag.

The original mini-laptop has an 8.9-inch screen, weighs just 1kg and comes with 12GB or 20GB of SD storage for music, pictures and video. It can also run either Windows XP or Linux.

Picture credit: Asus