De_Bunk - 16 January 2008 02:13 AM
Today, the area around me keeps getting power outtages…about 8 now..These cuts in power are doing my PC no good at all…I’m gonna have to buy a surge protecter..
DB
DB, if you’re getting power brown-outs or black-outs you don’t want a cheap surge protector for £5 or 6. You really need a decent UPS from a reputable company like APC or TrippLite. Check their websites for sizing but you probably want at least 1000 VA backup for 15 minutes so you will probably spend something more like £50 - 80 but it will save your digital life several times over with flaky power.
The worst power fluctuations are those that last a few seconds then repeat as in power drops for one second then recovers for two seconds then drops another second, etc. Laptops are “sort of” protected from this because of the built in battery but desktop or server equipment will have either disk failures or data write failures.
In August 2003 when most of Eastern Canada and the Eastern US blacked out, Wifey was quite proud to boast that she could continue to play her online games for most of the outage because our computers each had a 4000 VA UPS (ahem - grey market) that provided something like 30 hours of backup power.
Oldwilli
