Don’t you hate it when you lose power right in the middle of a document or other activity on your PC?

Me too.

But did you know your PC hates it too?
We all know we’re not supposed to just show down our PCs by pulling the power cord, or doing a forced power off by holding the power button down, but why?

Letting the machine shut down gracefully allows your operating system and applications to finish what they are working on, write their data to the hard drive, and safely power down.
The days of old when simply closing your open apps and hitting the power switch are long gone.
Now we have systems so complex and speed so essential that many things we think are written to the drive actually aren’t.
Forcing PCs to shutdown improperly can lead to data corruption, data loss, and an OS so damaged it may need to be serviced to bring it back to life.
So to help us in the epic struggle over losing data, we have the UPS.

No, not the delivery company.

The UPS I’m talking about stands for Uninterruptable Power Supply.
It’s like a large surge protection/battery backup for your PC.
If chosen right, it can give you plenty of time to finish a current task, or at least hit the “Save” button, and shut down.
And if you set it up right, it can even communicate with your PC and tell it when it’s dangerously low on power and tell your OS to perform an automatic shut down.
This way it’s taken care of even when you’re not around!

Now some people are probably thinking: “Hey, this all sounds like desktop stuff, I have a laptop so I don’t have to worry!”.
Wrong.
While you have the battery portion under control, plugging directly into the wall or a cheap power strip  leaves you just as vulnerable to power surges and other anomalies that can damage your adapter and/or laptop.
A proper UPS is designed with  protection from under-voltage, over-voltage, line noise, and significant surges.
Many power strips don’t offer any protection, and surge protectors don’t go as far.

So the investment into a UPS is a worthy one.
Head on over here to see what kind of UPS would be good for you (I’ve bought many units from this company and have been very happy).

Remember, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.