Hi Folks,
I thought I'd push out for comment a thoguht which I've been pondering from time to time.
A laptop is pretty nearly immune to mains supply failure, since its battery provides a backup and modern laptops can shutdown on low battery.
Desktops, on the other hand, need an external UPS to guard it against mains failure; and of course a UPS can be configured to signal the computer to shut down if the power cut lasts more than a certain time.
But it has occurred to me that there's no obvious reason why a desktop can't have its own internal battery like a laptop, and I'm wonderign why they don't.
Of course, laptop batteries are notorious for not having a very long useful life -- you can be lucky, in some cases, if you get 5 years out of one. And they're even more notorious for being horrendously expensive to replace, if indeed you can still find one by the time yours fails.
But I'd have thought that the space available in a desktop would offer scope for a more robust and cheaper solution. (In passing -- I have an ancient laptop whose battery has been shot for years, which however works well if you plug 12v DC into its PS socket; so I've happily been using it in "away from the mains" situations by attaching it to a motorcycle battery which weighs less than 4 pounds -- 1.7kgm -- so is within my definition of "portable").
So a robust lead-acid battery of the appropriate voltage could be installed into a desktop, if the appropriate circuitry were present in the box's PSU, and would presumably last longer, be easier to replace if necessary, and cost much less.
Does anyone know of desktop boxes which do this?
Thanks, and best wishes to all, Ted.
-------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) Ted.Harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 23-Jun-06 Time: 15:18:44 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------