On 10-Apr-07 15:45:06, J.R. Seago wrote:
This morning my town had a series of small power cuts between 05·00 and 06·00 hours, these were so short that the incandescent light bulb on my desk light didn't go out, only flicker. My Computer did reboot on the first two occasions but then on the third occasion wouldn't do anything, I 'phoned the local computer repair people at around 09·00, who got back to me later in the day as they had been inundated with calls on the same matter. My computer rebooted at about 12·00, apparently others are still not re-started.
I can;t offer informed advice about which laptop to go for (indeed I'll be interested to see what others say).
But, on the power-cut question, I think this is something to take serious precautions against if it's likely to happen at all often.
Where I live, this kind of repeated very brief cut happens on average every few weeks (but they tend to bunch as well, so if you get one on one day you may get another on the same day or within a few days).
Because of the disruption to a desktop when this happens (reboot and prolonged fsck etc.) I early on put my desktops onto a UPS. For other reasons I'm glad I did!
While a laptop will stay up during a power cut (by virtue of its battery), any computer (desktop or latop) is vulnerable to extreme voltages which may accompany the mains coming back on. And I lost a laptop (motherboard zapped) one day when four very brief cuts came in quick succession. The desktops were OK, since they were on the other side of the UPS, but the laptop (simply plugged into the mains) was killed. Punishment for complacency!
So now, I have the UP itself buffered from the mains by a surge-suppressor cable, so that's 2 layers (including UPS). And I also have 2 layers for the laptop (spike suppressor adaptor plugged into a surge-suppressor extension cable.
So far, I've survived the subsequent events! I strongly recommend taking this kind of precaution.
One puzzle: Given the prevalence of dodgy mains power in the Fens (and no doubt elsewhere), I'm surprised there are so few outlets for UPS kit. PC World don't seem to hold them any more, and the only place I know that does (World of Computers ar Milton, near Cambridge) only sells APC, which do not supply monitoring and control software for Linux (nearest is Apple OS X), whereas Belkin do (but my old Belkin UPS is getting fragile now).
Best wishes, and good luck, John! Ted.
-------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) ted.harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 10-Apr-07 Time: 17:36:50 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------