But can I afford to wait until my electricity spikes or goes out completely before I find out if I’m really protected?  What could happen to my computer on any stormy afternoon?

In truth, the cheap power strips I can pick up from office supply or computer stores usually don’t give me much protection.  The good ones might stop one power surge.  After the power strip stops the first one, they’re not likely to stop any more surges.  And most of the time people don’t know if they are effective any longer, but they just keep using them.

Why would I need to worry about power protection for my computer?  Because two things can happen, both will turn out very badly for me.  The first is that the power simply cuts out.  Now power outages are not a big deal for most appliances --if the power goes off on the TV, it goes off.  I can watch the Super Bowl after it comes back on without any trouble. But unlike TV’s, computers have my important data stored on them with constant changing files written to their disk drives.  If the power goes out during one of those disk operations at just the wrong time, I lose something important.  I can even lose my ability to boot the computer back up into Windows.  Then what will I do?

The second bad consequence is what they refer to as a “power surge”.  My electricity doesn’t necessarily cut out, but rather I get a spike of power which is too much for my equipment to handle.  Again, I experience all the bad things from a power surge as I would a power outage.  On top of that, my hardware can actually be damaged or destroyed and may never recover.

Can I protect myself (and my computer) from these dangers?  As a matter of fact I can, and it won’t cost me an arm and a leg.  We’ll be discussing how to do it next issue in Battery Backup – Part 2:  Safety In A Storm, The Other Kind Of UPS.

If you need more information, please call me at 630-379-0330, ext 216.