You realize, don’t you, that we live in the area (Tampa) with the highest concentration of lightning in the United States? You do have the best protection available don’t you? I try to. I have all three of my computers on UPS’s and I also have a whole-house surge protector on my outside wall under the meter. Besides buying (I thought) good quality UPSs that also have good surge protection specifications, I have insurance! To me that’s the best lightning protection of all; the $25K or so that you get when you buy an APC or Tripplite UPS. I have a positive conviction that if lightning wants to zap your beloved ‘puter, it will, period. So I have my machines well backed up to a removable hard drive, and I have insurance. The UPS, as far as I’m concerned, lets my machines survive the one-second blink-outs that frequently happen at my house. And for double insurance, I turn my computers off and unplug the modems.

One thing I hadn’t been able to figure out until now is how to disconnect my Roadrunner modem. Actually I can, I just don’t want to on the theory that if I mess with that cable too much I’ll cause more problems. The cable modem is powered by my UPS and must stay on, 24 hours a day. RR doesn’t want you to turn it off. What I want to do is disconnect the modem output to my PC while I’m away. The cable is a standard short network CAT 5 cable with RJ45 connectors on them. They look just like a telephone jack only bigger; they have eight conductors in the cable. I can buy a pin-to-pin adapter that is used to join two network cables and get another short cable so that the adapter is out in plain sight where I can disconnect it easily. I may do that.

I have the same kind of adapters for my telephone lines; they’re glued to the underneath side of my computer table at the outer edge, so I can easily tell they’re unplugged as I look in the door from 10 feet away.

So back to UPS’s. I bought one of those large surge strip/UPS combinations for my wife’s PC. This one was made by Tripp. The prices are seriously coming down, and I picked this one up for $75 at CompUSA. It’s rated at 280VA. This one was perfect because I could fasten it to the back of her desk which is located next to the living room. We worked hard to hide the wires to her PC to keep it from looking too junky. I even fastened some very small speakers to the back of the desk under the lip of the top so they can’t be seen. Hers was the last of the computers to get a UPS, mostly because I started feeling guilty for being so conscientious about my own and neglecting hers. This was after she asked what kind of surge protection was on hers. She assumed I did that when I built the computer for her.

Anyway, after only three months of loyal service, her UPS sacrificed its life, maybe, .. or maybe just committed suicide, I’m not sure. A real outage of six or eight minutes occurred one morning two weeks ago, and she was witness to it, but I had failed to instruct her on how to plug the monitor into the UPS just long enough to shut down Windows. The time on the little batteries was too much, so it died.

Now this really isn’t bad on the surface. My own experience is that the worst you can do to an electrical device is to blip it off and back on; characteristic of our one second power blips. So it had been doing a good job up until now. Not having the monitor on the backup is normal; it just shortens the time that the CPU is backed up because of the additional load. Under these circumstances the best thing to do if you’re sitting there and it looks like the power will not be coming on soon is to just power the system down after waiting for the hard drive activity to settle out. What you don’t want to happen is for the power to blip out while the hard drive is writing to the disk, and that’s what the UPS is good for, even a little one.

So she powered everything down and went on to work. I was first to the PC that evening, and saw that there were several lights blinking on the UPS, so I switched it off and back on, and now not only were all the lights blinking, but also it was making a low, short, regular alarm sound. So I disconnected everything from it, unplugged it from the wall, and it was still blinking and beeping. I set it down on the formica counter and then noticed it was warm, and, as the evening went on even warmer, so I had to take it outside so in case it burst into flames it wouldn’t burn the house down!

It was dead in the morning, so later I dug the receipt out and called them long distance (no 1-800 number) for an RMA number. The guy was OK with me I guess, after I assured him that the only thing that was plugged into it was the CPU and the answer machine power cube. I gained some respect from him there I think, so he gave me the address to ship it and to put a note "possible internal short" ( Hah! Definite Internal Short in my opinion!) on it. I pleaded a bit that I needed him to ship me the replacement now because I’m in the lightning capital of the US at the beginning of lightning season and I can’t survive two or three weeks without a UPS! No, my guess is that the call center he is in is somewhere in the desert maybe and he’s never seen a lightning storm. So it has to go by "trackable" carrier, which for those who know where I live is about a 45 minute trek through town to the guys in the brown trucks.

By the way, why doesn’t the postal service know where my stuff is? Now I’m talking like Andy Rooney.

So I’m waiting. I mailed it 10 days ago and I expect it will be another ten days, and in the meantime Valerie has to go back to unplugging her PC – the best surge protection of all, as we well know. u