Ups

[revve]

Monday morning, I'm going out to buy myself a UPS. Yes - I was busy coding for the last three or four hours, when the power at my house went down and up again immediately. All I knew was the lights dimmed for a second and my computer rebooted.

When it happened, I almost saw my life flash by my eyes (yes, a bit dramatic, I know). When my PC rebooted and I started Visual C++ again and loaded my project, it seemed I must have pressed CTRL-S just a millisecond before it happened. Must have been my lucky day... Just had to get this off my chest.

How many of you use a UPS? Any close encounters? Can anybody recommend a good ups for me to get? I'm not looking for anything big. Just something to prevent the above from happening again - I won't be this lucky again. :)

[Drake]

I used to live in the Seattle area, where trees fall on power lines on an hourly basis. I have been a fan of UPS's ever since. :) They have saved me many times when I lost power while coding, burning CDs, etc.

Even if you don't lose power entirely, a good UPS will "clean" your input voltage, correcting for little sags and spikes that you don't even notice. That alone makes it worth the money. I'd recommend anything from APC (http://www.apcc.com). Stay away from Belkin.

[ggambett]

I save my sources every few lines, it's an automated reflex at this point. I also use a journalled filesystem (ext3). So this is a non-issue for me - an UPS isn't really justified for us.

[BarrySlisk]

Every time you compile your project is saved right? Don't you ever compile?

[Savant]

I work on a laptop so the power going out doesn't really affect me at all. I have a few hours to save my work at that point. :)

[Drake]

Having a UPS is not just about keeping your unsaved work, it's about protecting your hardware. A lot of good your auto-save and journaled filesystem does when an outage sends the drive head skidding across the platter. That's not going to happen most of the time, but how many times would you like to experience it? Who even wants to deal with the annoyance of rebooting after a momentary blackout? Not me. You can get a basic UPS for $100 or less. Pretty cheap insurance.

On the other hand, if you do all your work on laptops, surge protection is good enough. ;)

[svero]

I've been using UPS's for years. They're essential in the kind of places I've been living. Very touch n go electric. Blackouts, brownouts and power spikes are very common.

[Hamumu]

I use an APC one myself, just picked a size that seemed reasonable. Like svero, I live in a land of unexpected power behavior, and we have these 1/2 second power drops, maybe a few a month. Not even enough to kill any of our clocks, but enough to shut off the computer. It's saved me countless times.

[GBGames]

Interestingly enough, I was working on something the other night when the power went out for a half second. Now, I've seen the lights dim before but my machines were fine. Not this time. Both of my computers were basically rebooted at the same time. My girlfriend's machine on the other side of the room was perfectly fine. :mad:

So UPS is on my list of things to buy as well. Now, if I just wanted to avoid the above happening, I think a UPS with six minutes of let-me-save-and-shutdown time should be good enough. On the other hand, what if I'm not home when it happens? A lot of good six minutes will do me if it won't be five hours until I come home to find out that the power went out. Unfortunately, it seems that a UPS with a longer battery life will cost a lot of money, and maybe it is more of an expense than can be justified. Thoughts?

[revve]

This happened again later last night (about 3am) and I lost a bit of work, but not by much. Fortunately, as mentioned whenever I compile it does save and I do also subconsiously hit ctrl-s every now and then.

The reasons I want to get a UPS is threefold:

1.) Obviously, losing work
2.) Hardware damage
3.) When I'm coding and "in the zone", I don't want to be interrupted by power glitches, then having to wait for my pc to restart and then having to redo the last couple of minutes of work.

Unfortunately, our power is very bad recently, because of mis-management at our local power station (they didn't do proper preventative maintenance, so now they regularly shut down the power generator to fix problems while waiting for parts). Whenever that happens, they need to get power from other parts of the country and that is what causes glitches.... Sigh - I live about 40km from South Africa's only nuclear power station - you'd think we'd have it better off. We have frequent glitches and many outages. It's really frustrating. It's also going to go on for a loooong time, since they can't find a part for one of their generators (they normally have two working at the same time for backup, but the one is off because they cannot find a part and the other is switched off regularly because they need to catch up on scheduled maintenance)

[Drake]

On the other hand, what if I'm not home when it happens? A lot of good six minutes will do me if it won't be five hours until I come home to find out that the power went out.
You can get a UPS that will connect to your computer via USB or serial port, and it will initiate a system shutdown for you when the power goes out. I think some can also boot the machine when power is restored, if you want. Customizable via software.

[Tom Gilleland]

We've had the power go out only a few times in about 15 years and I hardly lost anything because I save all the time. One time I had a hard drive crash and lost the whole main project drive. After that I keep backups of everything all the time. I normally just upload to the server, and also burn CDs. I wouldn't spend much on a UPS, I still don't use one. Just Backup, Backup, Backup.

I talked to a guy once who had lightning hit his phone line and fry some computers, and leave others alone. He had all the fancy surge protector stuff on the power line, but not the phone line. I even know of a guy who had a mouse nesting inside his PC. :eek: I wonder what color wires mice like to chew, or are they colorblind and chew them all?

Tom

[Gilzu]

About 6 months ago I decided to buy a UPS. didn't really know why, but I decided I should have one. I installed it, and everything appeared to be working, so I headed to play Dungeon Siege II.

I thing it was my longest playing session ever - about 13 hours, when the electricity suddenly stopped. If it weren't for the UPS, I would have played the same 13 hours (About an Act and a bit) again, annoyed, with red eyes.

[Oaf]

When I first moved to Greece I'd heard stories of how the electricity was 'dirty', together with tales of computers blowing up and so on. When I came to plug my PC in for the first time I plugged in one of those 4-way sockets with a built-in surge protector. It immediately tripped. Tried again - tripped.

There's often power cuts, particularly when there's lightning storms, which there are many! So we've got UPSs all over the house now!

Anyway, my advice would be to buy a cheap one - one that'll get you through the 1-sec outages - the price shoots sky high if you want one that'll last any length of time.

When you go to buy one, ask the sales assistant if he has any that don't beep! We've got four different makes of UPS here, all of them continually beep loudly when the power cuts out. And on all of them there's no way to switch the beeping off!

[revve]

I spoke to the guy that does our UPSs at work (last night). I'm going to get the same brand as we use here (I believe it's a local South African company) - a company/brand called Meissner. The real reason is (1) we use it here and at our clients and it works very well (2) the company's office is 10 minutes drive from my home, so I can get it serviced easily (3) it has an interface to my PC to shut down automatically and (4) I can get addon batteries for it to extend my uptime for as long as I want it to be.

I am getting a nice 1kva 600w unit. It is bigger than I need, but it will give me room to expand (I currently only need about 400w).

[yanuart]

Some computers are very power hungry (I owned 19" CRT monitor) and suck all the battery juice in no time. You don't even got the chance to properly shut down your computer properly if you bought low KVA ups.

I owned APC 1200KVA ( I guess.. forgot it exactly) and when there's a blackout, I only got somewhere between <10 mins to shutdown the computer, it's due to the battery age too. I strongly do not suggest the 600KVA.. it'll keep your computer on but not the monitor (even 17") so that's pretty silly.

I believe that these days, energy crisis is all around. Too many people, too many electronic equipments.

oh one more thing : Make sure the guarantee includes battery replacement for at least 1 year! In the old days it used to be 3 years :(.

[revve]

Okay - the UPS I was looking for was sold out. Now I'm getting the 1400va model (whoohoo - I love overkill) - the thing weighs 30kg (it apparently has huge batteries).

As for the beeping... it's been on my mind, but I'm very comfortable with a soldering iron - I've (permanently) disabled many a beep in my lifetime :D

(and yea, yea - I know I must be carefull. Shock hazard and all that)