Sunday, July 28, 2019

Uninterruptable power supply a must-have for desktop PCs

A drawback to living in forested northern Virginia is power outages during storms. Falling trees and branches knock down power lines on a pretty regular basis around here.
Even when the electricity doesn’t go completely off, the sensitive power grid will flicker off and on, enough to crash your desktop PC and require a reboot. If that happens enough times it can damage your PC.
That’s likely what happened to my work desktop computer a few months ago. It crashed and the solid-state drive became unreadable. I had to hire a service to recover my files. That wasn’t cheap, so now I back up my files online with Carbonite.
When my PC was repaired with a new SSD, I bought an uninterruptable power supply (UPS). It doubles as a high-end surge protector. It’s basically a large battery that manages power to my PC and other devices. So, if the power flickers off and on, my PC will keep running uninterrupted.
The UPS has already proven its worth. For example, earlier this month during a windstorm, power to my home flickered off and on eight times in about 20 minutes. But I was able to keep working.
I purchased a CyberPower UPS on Amazon and it has performed very well.
It’s interesting that notebook computers have uninterruptable power built in, but desktop PCs do not.

Photo: CyberPower UPS. (Cyber Power Systems of Shakopee, Minn.)

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