Last week,my block took an electrical surge, which promptly cooked my pentium 3 and a bunch of other crap in my computer. Just got it back yesterday with  a new motherboard, new chip,etc.. and after re installing all my programs and troubleshooting half the night, its up and running again. I do believe Florida has the worst electric service anywhere.My wall voltage fluctuates from 89 volts to 112v. I bought an uninteruptable power supply to combat this. I learned an expensive lesson.Power conditioners are your friend.

I learned a lesson the hard way too. Luckily the only thing fried was the modem. The surge came in thru the phone line! Killed every phone in the house.

I used to use a good UPS before, but now I plug in my phone cord into it too.

Make sure you buy a quality UPS. APC is what I use at home and work. One of our schools sits on a hill and has been hit by lightning 6 times this year. So far none of the server room equipment has been damaged!

Av.

Used to play PC tech in the Tampa/St. Pete area and saw that sort of damage frequently... If you're a modem user be sure to use the UPS to protect the phone line... also, if you're running a network hub or router protect that as well... the surge can still reach the 'puter otherwise.  Keep all non-UPS protected items, printer, scanner, routers, etc. on a GOOD surge protected power strip.

DId you have the UPS before it got fried?
If it's an APC UPS, they will help you with your loss under warranty, they are not supposed to let the spike/surge pass.

The only problem with that is it kills DSL if you run it thru the surge protector.

No kidding. I'm still tossing around keep the phone unprotected or suffer with the DSL hit.

Av.

If you buy A UPS, don't buy anything but a APC.

You could just buy a quality surge protector, they can be had from 20-50 bucks.

Of course if the power fails, your computer still will fail as well.

From real world expirence, 2000 and XP recover VERY nicely from being improperly shutdown.

NT and Win9x are a different story.

protect everything.. it's a lot cheaper than REPLACING everything.

We had an APC UPS go bad a while back.  It was a battery problem.  Instead of replacing the batteries, they opted to replace the whole unit from one in stock.  guess who took the 'old' one home? [:D]

I took two of the batteries I had at home from a project at work where they replaced some batteries out of some other UPS's on a 2 year exchange service.   a bit of creative wiring later (my field) and presto! a nice ups for the home server.  You'd be surprised the amount of under and over voltages that are on the power lines here in metro denver.

It's also cool for surfin' when the power's out!  (only drawback is the monitor is a power pig)

I've been using nothing but APCs for 10 years. Everything from the BackUPS 900, to what I have now, a Smart-UPS 1400. Without a doubt, APC's quality has degraded over the years. I don't know what their problem is, but they are not as good as they used to be. And if the damn thing craps out, they send you a refurbished unit, not a new unit. This is probably okay, but in every case there were scratches and dents in the replacement.

When my Smart-UPS 1400 fails AGAIN, I plan to look a different brands. I'm on the 3rd Smart-UPS 1400 in three years, and that is just unacceptable for a $600 unit.