November 10, 2008
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well here’s the other thing i was going to talk about last night, before i ran out of time.
during my plethora of errands yesterday, i stopped at Fry’s and bought a fancy new UPS. it has quite a bit more power than what i need right now (i have my widescreen monitor and computer plugged into it, and when i am playing Fallout 3 the power draw on the UPS is about 299 watts, out of a maximum output of 540. when idle, they draw about 190 watts) which means i have a lot of room to grow and the potential to back up quite a bit more than what i already am. what prompted this was a recent series of power outages, including an outage that was preceded by a brownout that damaged my linux and windows installs beyond any repair. windows was unrecoverable, linux booted but after a day or two it went towards what is technically known as Shit Just Fucking Breaks. i’d go into it in greater detail but i need to get ready for work soon.anyway, even with the load put on the UPS by a very graphically-intense game like Fallout 3, this UPS gives me more than ten minutes of runtime, and the idle draw gives me more than twenty minutes. considering it would take maybe two or three minutes tops to shut down windows even in the midst of a game, that is plenty. but perhaps my favorite feature is the auto-shutdown: if the power cuts out, and the UPS has less than five minutes of battery power left, it will force my computer to shut down. so even if i’m not around, i can rest easy knowing the UPS will handle it. i see this as an investment. i spend about a hundred bucks now, and save myself from spending a couple hundred or even more than a thousand to rebuild my computer after it gets fried by transient currents or high surges, along with not having to worry about losing all of my precious data to a power loss.
anyway, time to get dressed. also, sorry for the not-so-great picture, the underside of my desk isn’t exactly the most well-lit place in the house.
