On Feb 16, 9:44*pm, Tony Hwang wrote:
Nate Nagel wrote:
On 02/16/2011 09:30 PM, wrote:
On Feb 16, 9:23 pm, G. wrote:
Nate wrote:
Got an *ancient* (and I do mean ancient) APC UPS... all it does is back
up my wireless router. Battery is done. new one I expect to cost
$30-40 (which I find extortionate as I buy them for work at about $10
all day but still.)

options:

1) buy a new battery. Be happy for another 5 years or so. Cost $40 max.

2) buy a new true-online UPS for my PC, and rotate the old,
sorta-decent
one currently serving PC to wireless router duty. Would cost $266 for a
750VA unit with trade in (smallest one that qualifies for trade in
credit) or $252 for a 1000VA unit (yeah, I don't understand that
either.)

which would you do? This is an old UPS that I scavenged from a previous
employer something like 7-8 years ago, and at that time it was being
discarded because the battery was dead then, so it now could
conceivably
be as many as 15 years old.

I want to go true online but worth the cost? Have had no problems with
my setup so far. (touch wood.)

nate

Hi Nate,

If your UPS has a line-conditioner and software "Parachute", I
would replace the batt. You can get a 7.5 Ah gel-cell for $20 at
an alarm-parts supplier.

If not, I'd go for one with a line conditioner and the
safe-shutdown software. - Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

I think the first question here is what's the overall mission
objective?
I haven't had a UPS on any of my home computers or routers. The
only problems I've had are if the power goes out, which is infrequent,
I might lose whatever work I had open. Even that isn't for sure, as
many apps do timed saves of the open documents, so you may
only lose the last 15 mins.

I've never had a disk corrupted by the power failing, or anything like
that.
Nor can I recall ever losing any document, etc that I was working on
that
amounted to anything. So, I personally wouldn't spend $40, let alone
several hundred on any UPS.

I have had all of the above happen. In fact at one house in which I
lived, the power went out so often that it managed to corrupt a PC that
was running *LINUX*.

Thing was so obsolete it wasn't worth the time to reinstall... into the
trash it went.

I won't be without a UPS again. I have two because if the cable modem
and wireless router lose power even for a second or two it's annoying to
wait for them to reboot.

nate

Hmmm,
I gave been living in this house for alnost 20 years since it's built.
During that time total time for power outage was ~30 minutes.
I don't think I need a UPS, just another thing to look after. We have 3
Desk top, 3 laptops scattered around in the house as well as WiFi Skype
phone.

You're lucky. Some places I've lived power has been pretty good. The
place I'm thinking of though, as often as not the clock on the
microwave would be flashing when I got home from work. The power
would never *stay* out for long - it'd just blip out long enough to
reset the clocks and reboot the computers. never went more than a
couple days without that happening at least once. sometimes it'd
happen several times a day.

For whatever reason, PEPCO seems to do a much better job than BG&E, so
I'm glad I don't live in MD anymore (for many reasons.)

nate