how many of you use UPS's (surge protector/back-up battery)?

It seems liek a few people prefer normal surge protectors than the battery backup i can;t understand why

A UPS as being an Uninterruptable Poewr supply... yeah don't they cost alot because of what they have to do, and besides surely their design is jsut for critical servers to bear up to 40 minutes of no mains. Give any decent home desktop (by decent I mean enthusist built) and its like 10 minutes which isnt long enough to save and shut down anything, meaning its what pointless?

UPS cost a lot. I want one, but it's not worth the £100+ outlay for power cuts. A small battery in a plug for power dips could be useful, so your comp doesn't die if the lights flicker. Surge protectors are dirt cheap and save you a lot of money int he case of a surge. Plus they always have lots of plugs, which are needed anyway.

in the clasical fasion they basicly only just give enouth time to save work and start to shut down but theres few situations where you realy need this and the life length of cells in such a ups will never give u much of an advantage if u folow standard regula saving process ul do much better, a surge protector (also regurly fitted in a ups) is designed to prevent sudden overloading of circuits with current stoping physical damage to semi conductor components, a ups is efectivly to save from lose of work /or up time but wont stop physical damage (apart from minor file corruption but only if ur unlucky dose this happen )

Surge protectors serve a different purpose than UPS systems though, and if you were fanatical about the whole thing you could have a surge protector linked up to your UPS.

Businesses use them in server rooms so that they get some time to correctly close down services in the correct order, and shut down servers correctly - sometimes having big RAID arrays and a power cut do not go well (not having your bits in the right place).

For a home user to have one is pretty extreme.

But yeah, a surge protector is to protect from electrical damage - everyone should have one of these. A UPS does not protect you against surges but gives you a type of backup generator, which is totally unnecessary for me.

um well as i explained to aaron i had one for £50 given to me by my dad, recently it broke and the battery didn't work, no even a new one. Belkin very nicely replaced it with a new UPS and it has four slots for battery and surge protection and another four on the other side for just surge protection.

I do not get where the UPS doesn't have surge protection came from aaron.

But yeah if i didn't have one upgraded, i probably wouldn't have bothered with a UPS

UPS != surge protector

You can have a UPS with a built in surge protector, but it doesn't necessarily mean it does.

But if you have a UPS you might as well use it.