Sorry, if I offended you Bonzai, that was not my intention. I apologize if my remark was out of line. I was attempting to make a joke, I've found BestBuy's sales people to have a habit of aggressively pushing UPS's on people spouting doom if you don't. I had one sales person flat out tell my grandma her computer would be dead in 9 months if she didn't buy a UPS for her $220 emachine. But I digress...
I'm a details person and I did presales technical consulting for HP for 4 years (meaning making hardware recommendations to clients based on their stated usage). The reason I made that comment is I see a blanket recommendation of buying a UPS to do about as much harm as good to the average user for two reasons.
Reason 1 - False sense of security: Bob the sales guy tells Joe User he needs a UPS to protect him from power fluctuations and outages. Bob's arguments make sense to Joe, so he goes and buys the cheapest UPS they have on the shelf. Bob then hooks up 800w worth of equipment into a 400w UPS believing his equipment is now safe. Since he believes he's safe, he neglects other best practices such as backing up data or shutting off his computer during a storm. However, in reality, he's going to get 0 runtime off his UPS because he's far exceeded it's capacity. Joe is also unaware how to test the UPS or that the batteries need replacement over time so he continues believing he's safe until eventually the situation arises where he needed the UPS and it didn't work.
Reason 2 - Poor return on investment: Significant data loss from a power outage simply isn't that common on a home computer. Sure, you're going to lose anything you might actively be working on, but in nearly 30 years of computer usage and 12 years in the IT industry, I don't recall a single case of a power outage causing catastrophic data loss on a home computer. I ran RAID-0 for many years both with spindles and SSD's, had more than my share of power outages. Not once did I have any noticeable data loss/corruption from it. You're far more likely to have data loss from a virus or hardware failure. More importantly the batteries have a finite lifespan. 3-5 years on good batteries, less on cheap ones regardless how much if any usage you got out of them. On the cheap side, you're talking a couple hundred dollars every few years for a "just in case" device, maybe more depending on their needs. I would rather see the user take that money and invest it in a proper backup solution like Crashplan.
I see a UPS recommendation just like any other computer recommendation. You need to know the usage scenario before making a recommendation.
I'm a details person and I did presales technical consulting for HP for 4 years (meaning making hardware recommendations to clients based on their stated usage). The reason I made that comment is I see a blanket recommendation of buying a UPS to do about as much harm as good to the average user for two reasons.
Reason 1 - False sense of security: Bob the sales guy tells Joe User he needs a UPS to protect him from power fluctuations and outages. Bob's arguments make sense to Joe, so he goes and buys the cheapest UPS they have on the shelf. Bob then hooks up 800w worth of equipment into a 400w UPS believing his equipment is now safe. Since he believes he's safe, he neglects other best practices such as backing up data or shutting off his computer during a storm. However, in reality, he's going to get 0 runtime off his UPS because he's far exceeded it's capacity. Joe is also unaware how to test the UPS or that the batteries need replacement over time so he continues believing he's safe until eventually the situation arises where he needed the UPS and it didn't work.
Reason 2 - Poor return on investment: Significant data loss from a power outage simply isn't that common on a home computer. Sure, you're going to lose anything you might actively be working on, but in nearly 30 years of computer usage and 12 years in the IT industry, I don't recall a single case of a power outage causing catastrophic data loss on a home computer. I ran RAID-0 for many years both with spindles and SSD's, had more than my share of power outages. Not once did I have any noticeable data loss/corruption from it. You're far more likely to have data loss from a virus or hardware failure. More importantly the batteries have a finite lifespan. 3-5 years on good batteries, less on cheap ones regardless how much if any usage you got out of them. On the cheap side, you're talking a couple hundred dollars every few years for a "just in case" device, maybe more depending on their needs. I would rather see the user take that money and invest it in a proper backup solution like Crashplan.
I see a UPS recommendation just like any other computer recommendation. You need to know the usage scenario before making a recommendation.