On Sun, 2004-11-21 at 11:14 +0800, John Summerfield wrote: > You do want one with good electronis; most outages are just a few seconds, and > if the power is off there's a fair chance you have other things on your min > than using the computer. Stick with line interactive technology and stay away from standby or SPS technologies which are both outdated. Both SPS and standby do not filter your power through the battery, so you're not assured of good voltage conditioning. The advantage of SPS technology is low cost. However, in recent years the cost advantage of SPS has been squashed by line-interactive UPS's which are incredibly inexpensive. There are other UPS types, but they are either obsolescent or targeted at large data-center installations. Also, the only other thing I'd look at is uptime during a power failure. Trust me: In the event of a power failure, the longer your ability to run off of the UPS, the happier your going to be (In the long run...). Buying used is OK if you know the unit your getting is based on line interactive technology and you have extra money left over from the purchase to replace the batteries. Many UPS's are directly supported in Linux (Which is a really cool). So, before you purchase, you may want to check out the UPS howto: http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/UPS-HOWTO/ Best regards Marvin Dickens
