Good post Beepster. I bought a APC on Ebay 7 years ago and is still going. Once you get one you can get replacement batteries for them at a good price.

slart - correct - the true UPS's are expensive and have to have their batteries changed more often than the consumer ones, which is exactly why they make the consumer ones the way they do.  and normally a switching time of 10msec or so will not very likely cause a loss of power in a consumer computer operating under normal circumstances, so you shouldn't lose data with consumer UPSs under normal circumstances.
 
One could see, however, that a switching time of 10msec to 30msec (typical real world application) could potentially cause someone to lose data if they were using a lot of power during that switch.
 
is this something normal users need to worry about?  probably not.  it's just a pet peeve of mine.  and it DOES help to be informed just in case you think you might be a user who might be affected by a switch time like this.
 
this pet peeve is just one of mine...I also can't stand it when people say "PIN Number" or "VIN Number"...
 

cheap, i tell you.
 

Only just spotted this thread...
 
About a decade ago I lost a PC due to a power failure.
 
Where we live, despite it being an industrial inner city area in the UK where these things aren't supposed to happen, we typically get a couple of power cuts a year. Apparently the problem is that lots of the high-voltage cabling is (very) old and underground and suffers from water ingress. Which means power cuts. The electricity people won't replace the entire cabling because it's a huge job that would take ages and badly upset their profits. So they keep patching things up and have been for about 25 years.
 
Anyway, we usually get a few minutes warning as the power flickers a bit before dying. This one time, with no warning, the power went completely off and back on again something like 10 times in two or three seconds then cut completely.
 
On restarting the PC some of the magic blue smoke got out. I opened it up to find a big burst capacitor in the psu and some charred areas on the motherboard.
 
So we got a good quality UPS. Which has finally gone out of service this week because its' second set of lead-acid batteries finally expired, which they seem to do every five years or so, and both the UPS and the required batteries haven't been manufactured for several years. The UPS wasn't cheap, but it handled quite a number of power cuts giving ample time for Windows to automatically shut down when the UPS notified it of a power failure.
 
Still looking for a replacement, the cheap consumer "UPSs" are rubbish, to keep a PC and screen running for the 30-60 seconds an automatic or manual shutdown takes requires more power than many of them can supply. They also tend to be a switching supply serving a square-wave current not sine wave which has implications as well. Some psus really don't like that kind of AC.
 
I guess the answer is to use just laptops because they're power-cut proof, though they come with their own sets of issues.

I have been watching this thread despite my silence. I guess I've got a bunch of stuff to ask but for now I think I will limit it to this one question...
 
I spent about $100 on a nice 700W Coolermaster power supply for my system when I built it. IIRC (this was almost four year ago) I dropped the extra coin to a) make sure I needn't worry about powering the unit (700w seemed to be above what's needed for a DAW) and b) because it seemed to claim that it does a bit of conditioning, protection and provides better power distribution.
 
No idea if that's true which is why I'm asking... by buying this higher end PSU did I also perhaps buy at least a BIT of a buffer for avoiding damage to crucial components such as the MOBO? Actually I think my biggest concern is the MOBO and CPU considering they are the most expensive parts of the rig and the most PITA to replace.
 
Anyway... beyond that I have a Belkin power strip that supposedly provides surge protection (with $1000 of insurance against surge damage supposedly but whatever... I doubt they'd pay out but it does lead me to believe it's better than some dollar store strip). At the end of the day, after I shut down, I wait a few minutes for everything to discharge then flip Coolermaster's power switch off and THEN turn the Belkin strip off. If I hear a storm a brewin' I even totally remove the power cables from the back of the computer and unplug my interface.
 
I also live in a new building (built in the past 5 years) and they just changed out all the hydro hookups/transformers/lines to the building (they literally ripped out all the old poles and everything)... so I guess maybe all that counts towards decent and even power as well (as opposed to all the ancient buildings in ancient neighborhoods with ancient wiring I've lived in in the past).
 
Meh... I do seriously need a proper UPS though.