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The power into my apartment is causing random bluescreening on my computer, and may be why the motherboard is defective (or it may have been defective from the factory). Anyway, it seems like the best way to combat this is with a UPS. All I need is something that will power a 6 year old 19" monitor, 130W speaker system, and Athlon64 3000+ computer and provide good clean power. I don't know exactly whether the problems are caused by sagging power levels, irregular voltage, or what, so it would need to protect against all of the usual suspects. So I'm looking for the cheapest UPS that's still among the best in quality. Any suggestions?

IIRC, power irregularities are rather overrated and shouldn't do that much to your machine as a whole, though the PSU might take a hit (except for big loads, anyways). Even so, you might consider investing in a line conditioner (Tripp-Lite makes some).

The best UPS are ones similar to APC's SmartUPS line. They are not cheap, especially with the load you're demanding on it. You can get refurbished ones cheaper here but it'll still cost you.

Er, why would you need to power your speakers off of the battery backup?

APC is collectively the Man. I've had two computers powered off a single 500VA UPS for a year and a half, through two entire hurricanes, with zero damage to either PSU.

phongn wrote:IIRC, power irregularities are rather overrated and shouldn't do that much to your machine as a whole, though the PSU might take a hit (except for big loads, anyways). Even so, you might consider investing in a line conditioner (Tripp-Lite makes some).

Having the power drop below level required to keep the entire computer running would cause issues.

Personally, I'm worried about power surges here. We have a bunch of quartz halogen 240V lights, they die fairly reguarly due to power surges.

Damn, Art. That's rough stuff. As with others here, I'd recommend looking at what APC has to offer. My roommate swears by his. Depending on how often your system has gone through a on/off/on cycle I'd keep a close eye on the power supply. I had an issue a while back when I upgraded my motherboard. I can't honestly say what went wrong first, but I had to replace a stick of RAM and a power supply before things settled down. FYI.

ggs wrote:Having the power drop below level required to keep the entire computer running would cause issues.

Yes, but that kind of undervolt might not be fixable by an UPS. Switched power supplies are remarkably resiliant to things like that. If there aren't enough amps coming in to power the machine then no UPS in the world is going to help him. I'm wondering if there's another problem with his machine.

Well, I found out it wasn't the power after all. It was a bad stick of RAM. I found out it was the RAM when I booted my old computer with it and the stick caught fire! Luckily it went out when I cut the power, and didn't seem to damage anything other than the motherboard which was old anyway. Also lucky that it's Corsair RAM, which has a lifetime warranty.

Funny thing is that I used memtest86 and left it running for about 20 minutes and it didn't detect anything. I figured that if it didn't see a problem right away, then doing the same test 200 more times wouldn't find anything. Guess I figured wrong.

One run through memtest doesn't tell you anything -- you can't extrapolate information from a single data point. You really should run it many times (perhaps even 24 hours, though some usually do 12 hours of memtest and 12 hours of Prime95, IIRC) to see if your RAM is good.

But it caught fire???

There was a loud sparking sound when I powered the machine on, and I looked to see a very small but white hot point of fire. When I shut it off, there was a cloud of smoke that smelled like someone had just melted a plastic bag. I opened all the windows, of course.

The mobo is probably fried, but I'm not too concerned about that.

Had an APC ups but I made the mistake to connect the vacum cleaner to it (Don't ask) and it was never the same again...

Miss that one got it for free at a tradeshow

Faram wrote:Had an APC ups but I made the mistake to connect the vacum cleaner to it (Don't ask) and it was never the same again...

Miss that one got it for free at a tradeshow

......What the hell were you thinking?

Arthur_Tuxedo wrote:

Faram wrote:Had an APC ups but I made the mistake to connect the vacum cleaner to it (Don't ask) and it was never the same again...

Miss that one got it for free at a tradeshow

......What the hell were you thinking?

Connected an extension cord to run a pal's laptop when it was low on battery.

Forgot about that and thought that I need to Vacum clean and hey here is an extension cord GREAT!...

You guess the rest.

Some people make a similar mistake in plugging in a laser printer into an UPS. Don't do that either.

I did almost the same thing, only it was doing some rewiring after being up for about twenty hours. Came home one day, wondered why one of my UPSes was screaming at me, went under the desk to check it...hey, why's the air conditioner plugged into th..SHIT!