Computing

How to protect your computer equipment from power outages

Your computer is fast becoming a very critical piece of equipment for both home and work. Power outages prevent the use of your computer and if you use your computer for work and have to prepare time-sensitive material, a power outage can be detrimental to you. Also, power outages can produce conditions that could damage your computer as well.

Here are some tips to protect your computer from a power outage:

.  Use an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) to keep your computer running for a short time in the event of an outage. Using an UPS will filter any power spikes as well.

.  Use a surge protector for plugging in your computer. The surge protector will provide filtering for power spikes. Try to never plug your computer directly into a wall outlet.

.  For laptops, you can buy external battery packs that run around $100.00 USD. These external packs can run your laptop for around 3 extra hours in addition to the capacity of your internal laptop battery. Don't use the external battery with a discharged internal battery because when the power from the external battery is drained, the laptop will not go into standby mode - it will just die causing you to lose any open files.

.  Make frequent and regular backups of important files or work done for the day. This cannot be stressed enough. REMEMBER: Backups are never important - until you need them. There are some software packages such as Novastor Backup ( www.novastor.com ) that have a really nice incremental backup solution for files that changed since a baseline full backup. Novastor is relatively inexpensive as well.

.  If you are able to, turn off computers at home during thunder and lightning storms. It would also be wise to turn off computers after any power outage so there is no surge when the power returns. Also, you might want to unplug computers from the wall as well. This is not always feasible but if you have the time to do it, it is very safe.

Always try to keep in mind contingencies for keeping your computer work going. If you have a "hot" project you are working on, you might want to store files on flash memory. That way you could maybe take the memory card to a public computer if your home or office power is out and you do not have a laptop.