A surge supressor does just that, supresses surges in the power line. To
protect your equipment and data from brownouts and blackouts, you'll need
an uninterruptable power supply. This is basically a battery unit placed
inline with your power connection to the wall socket. During normal
service, it draws a little power to keep the batteries charged and most of
them condition the power flow as well. When an interruption or brownout
occurs, the UPS switches over to the batteries. Depending on how much you
want to spend, you get varying amounts of power for varying amounts of
time. Basically, you want enough power to keep all of your peripherals and
your main system going long enough to do an orderly shutdown.
Having just experienced the wonderful collapse of the power grid out here
last week, I can relate to power worries. Even with surge supressors and
turning things off as fast as we could get to them, we still managed to fry
two power supplies on our Micron systems. All of the Macs came through
unscathed, though!
-- Bruce Carter, Instructional Software Designer (208)385-1851@voice Boise State University, Boise, ID 83725 (208)385-1856@fax http://mentor.idbsu.edu/BruceCarter/home.html bcarter@mentor.idbsu.edu