It’s a miserable day outside so you decide to spend the day drafting proposals to your clients. You have been working on one particular proposal for a couple hours and the power goes out. You curse because 3 hours of work has gone down the drain because it had not been saved. Using battery backups or uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) can eliminate this problem.

Depending on your neighborhood, power interruptions or loss can happen regularly. Even a power interruption a second long can cause many problems with your computer including just turning it off suddenly. Thinking back it is easy to say “I would have spent $80 to save myself 4 hours of grief”. It’s best that you act on that thought now by going to your local electronics store and making a wise purchase. You don’t need an expensive one as the purpose of these units isn’t to continue working during a power loss or interruption. You want it only to allow you to save your work and shut down your computer safely.

Power failure is responsible for over a quarter of all system breakdowns. There are many consequences of computer breakdowns, such as:

• Backlog of work/loss of production
• Loss of data
• Deterioration of customer service, espeically if used when interacting with the customer directly
• Loss of physical equipment

APC is a company that produces UPS models that are commonly available and definitely serve their purpose. They advertise approximately one half hour and more of backup time. These times are under ‘ideal’ conditions with more realistic times hitting 5-10 minutes. You only want to plug in your computer tower, monitor and maybe a printer to the battery backup & surge protection outlets with other items such as speakers and other devices into the surge protection outlets.  You don’t need your speakers to quickly save your work during an outage and adding unnecessary items to the battery backup outlets will reduce the effectiveness of the UPS.

Every 6 months, check the status of the UPS to make sure it is still protecting you. Most models will have indicator lights with their status but read the owner’s manual just in case.