I was pushing a few more albums onto my empeg a couple of nights ago (At some point I'll have to buckle down and install the maxfid patch that everyone is swooning over) and was mindlessly regarding my old, hodge-podge PC and assorted other accessories with disdain, although I shouldn't. It works well together and I shouldn't be worrying about upgrades- I spend waaay too much time dreaming over the Fry's Electronics ads. At one point (in a precient flash of practicality) I thought that just about the only component that was lacking for my system would be some form of power outage protection.
On cue, <BLINK> went the lights.
Horror! Had the tracks finished writing to the empeg? Yes- they had. The empeg was busily rebuilding the database just before the outage. It seemed to weather the power glitch and continue the database rebuild. As soon as I got my PC awake again and the empeg had finished the work and gone to sleep, I started Emplode- which then did a complete media check. In all, it took a couple of hours to recover but there was nothing lost and the systems handled everything automatically.

Quick! Back to the Fry's ads...
I recall a number of months ago someone posted up about the issues they were having with their UPS- some sort of alarm that wouldn't shut up or something. I did some meager searching of the BBS, but couldn't find what I wanted.
Anyway, what I really want is to solve this weakness in my computing system.
So- toward that end I respectfully request some opinions regarding my options for this weekend's purchase plan.

Here we have three UPSs on sale at Fry's this weekend:
APC 325VA $19 (after rebate)
APC 500VA $49 (no rebate)
Conex 950VA $59 (after rebate)

The system consists of:
1. HP desktop PC and 21" CRT
2. NAS homebrew
3. Netgear router
4. Cable Modem
5. empeg (powered via standard AC->DC 'wall wart')
I'm not worried about powering the amp and speakers that I run sound through and I realize that the cable modem and the router may not be *required* to be protected against power glitches.
Anyone know how a transformer like the empeg's 'wall wart' will like life (for a few moments) on a UPS?
Anyone wish to say a few words about any of the above purchase options?
Thanks!

edit: another result of the power outage was to reset my status as 'logged in' to the BBS.
For the last couple of days I couldn't understand why new posts weren't highlighted for me! DUH!

With a 21 inch CRT, you are going to want a pretty large UPS if you want any sizable uptime during an outage. And I can't recommend the Conex, as I have one here that I am finally getting rid of. I bought it cheep at CompUSA for my server, and about 6 months later I found my server was powered off and the cable modem reset. Attempting to power on the server failed till I unplugged it and let it sit 5 minutes. Same thing kept happening, and I thought the power supply was dying. I even caught it happening once, the server would power off, the UPS would then chirp and reset, so I figured the power supply was the issue. I replaced the power supply, and had the problem resurface recently. Swapped UPSes out, and now the server has been running just fine with no interruption.

Now I need to go buy another UPS for the HDTV, as thats the one I snagged for the server now. I keep a UPS on the DLP since I have heard bad things about the bulb being damaged in power outages from overheating when the fans stop.

A "VA" or "volt-amp" is a watt. Sort of. You need one that will support all of that hardware. Your PC's power supply is liable to be 350W by itself, and the CRT is liable to be pretty high wattage, too. Add them up and make sure you get something that will support all that power. Now, if you get something that's going to support 5W more than your consumption, you're only going to have a few minutes worth of uptime. If you just want to live through a bllip or allow everything to shut down properly, then that should be okay. But if you want to weather a longer outage, you'll need something with more capacity.

APC has a UPS selector that might help you size the correct UPS for you.

If you just want to weather a blip and shut down for longer outages, consider two things. Get a UPS that communicates with your PC so your PC can shut down on its own, and consider not hooking your monitor up to it. If it's a blip, you can wait for your monitor to power back on, and if the computer shuts itself down, you don't need to see anything, especially considering how much power CRTs suck down.

Thanks, Drakino and Bitt!

I'm mainly concerned that 'little blips' on the grid are smoothed over. Of course, there's no way of knowing that a little blip isn't going to turn into a bigger one... exept to wait. No, I don't want to power the system in full-function mode if the power goes down entirely.

I can see that the big CRT is a power suck. If I dis-include it from the UPS protection, I'm assuming the PC won't care (and cause other burps that might hinder a UPS signalled shut down).
The UPS 'shut down' option looks very handy for the PC.
The homebrew NAS is a linux box. I'm not sure that the UPS shut down software will be useful at all in that case, but the box is pretty hardy and doesn't seem to mind abuse (so far as I can tell).
Thanks for the warning about Conext. Perhaps I should buy two cheap UPSs and split up the protection.

If I go for a 'minimum' setup, I know I'm still not protected for long-term outages, but the most worrisome event I can imagine now is if the PC/NAS/Router/empeg link is disturbed during file transfer. It seems that for less than $100 I can protect myself against little glitches like the one I had Thursday night.

I'll rig up a tester and see how much my components are pulling during 'normal' operation. I'm assuming that's less than the output wattage of the various power supplies.

No votes against APC products?

Bare in mind that the APC UPS selector typically over estimates power requirement quite a bit. My two servers run 30 minutes or so on my APC UPS that was speced to run for 5 minutes...

...and there is a router and a switch running on there as well that I didn't even tell the APC UPS selector about.

APC is the big dog in the UPS world. I also like Opti-UPS (www.opti-ups.com), just bought a PS500B from them for my a/v gear because it does really nice line conditioning -- both voltage and frequency boost and buck.

VA doesn't directly relate to runtime, a 900VA UPS with four 12V 17A batteries will last for two hours, a 1000VA with two 12V 7.2A batteries lasts about 12 minutes with the same load.

There are ways of connecting the UPS to one computer and running software that will communicate over the network to shut all computers down.

Oh, and on wall warts, you need to use the INPUT figures to compare to the VA rating of the UPS, not the output, because some/much of the input gets turned into heat. I've got one here that's 4.8W input, but 7.5VDC 300mA = 2.25VA output, turning 2.55 VA into heat.

The APC UPS I have with USB is simply seen as a USB battery by the OS. In the case of Windows XP, it integrates into the power control panel and simply acts similar to a laptop battery. You can set at what percentage you want a certain action to occur, and it happens when the UPS reports that it is at that level. I'd recommend turning on hibernate support, and setting the PC to hibernate at a certain percentage. That way even if you are away from the machine and had an unsaved document open, it would be saved by the hibernate process, along with whatever programs you had open at the time.

I'll look and see what I can do in ME for power management and hibernation. First glance is it's not as easy as you say, but a second and third look are forthcoming.
I've bought the 325 and the 500 and hooked them up as I described above. The 500 has shut-down support while the 325 does not, but if I can activate the shut-down via the network that shouldn't matter.
Thanks, all!

The only bad thing about the shut down software is that there is no wake up software. Not so important on a home network, I just think that would really be sweet on a server.

If I were you, I'd get a larger UPS, use it to power your Linux-based NAS and your PC, but attach the communication to the NAS. Run apcupsd on the NAS, and set up the Windows client on your PC. I've run in this mode before, and it's worked great for me. apcupsd is going to give you a lot more control over what happens during an outage than any other program you're likely to find, plus, of the free ones mentioned in this thread, it's the only one that's going to let you shut down multiple computers.

Getting a computer to start back up on its own after a power failure is just making sure that when a failure does occur, that your computers OSes are shut down, but the power is still on. As long as your computers are set to turn on when they get power (usually a BIOS setting these days), they'll resume when the power comes back on. It's possible for this to fail if the power comes back on in the few seconds between OS shutdown and when the power would have gone off, but there's not much you can do about that. There's no software solution, either. It's hard for software to run on a shut-down computer.

Cool. For some reason, I hadn't thought of this. Sometimes I feel like such a schmuck.

apcupsd, server or client, should work fine on any Windows machine, I think.

It's raining tonight and the local grid is especially flakey. In the past 10 minutes I've had two blips that dropped the house lights... but not my computers!
Nice to hear the UPSs clicking in and out again as the power went down and up.
Muhahaha! I have mastered electricity!!

Thanks to all-