Loren Pechtel lorenpechtel hotmail.com wrote:

John Doe jdoe usenetlove.invalid wrote:

I use a voltage regulator. It includes surge suppression and is
almost comparable in price to a good surge suppressor. Unlike an
uninterruptible power supply, there is no battery to mess with.
The regulator protects against momentary voltage sags/overages.
The vast majority of users could get by with that instead of
messing with a UPS. Running my system on a battery is cool, but
I have never been in a situation when it was necessary. But that
was man-made and it didn't destroy anything. Early editions of
Windows trained me well, and blackouts are rare.

How long does the power tend to go out where you are? Here I'm
used to very short outages--blink the lights, reboot the PC
type.

That is the type of outage that my voltage regulator has handled
perfectly. The lights can blink and the speaker system can pop but
the computer shows no sign of being effected. Back then, I was
suffering from spontaneous reboots. I do not recall how important
the effort to eliminate spontaneous rebooting was when I bought
the voltage regulator, but it did permanently eliminate those
reboots. Since then, my house electricity has been overhauled, but
the regulator still does its clicky stuff when a nearby room air
conditioner turns on. My PC power supply would probably handle
that very short voltage drop, but at least I know what the
electrical system is doing.

I bought a 1200 VA (or whatever you would call it) regulator, that
might be overkill, but it might include larger capacitors that are
more useful for spanning very short outages. Capacitors probably
do that work. Would be nice to see some marketing hype about the
capacitors, but I didn't see it. Your mileage may vary. User
experiences would be good reading. I suppose there is more such
discussion in reviews on the web. I seem to recall praise, but
maybe not much about the details.

I think the corrected voltage drop time will be long enough to
make your PC stay off if the voltage drop is long enough to remove
power from your PC through the regulator. In other words... I
suspect that your PC cannot spontaneously reboot due to power
fluctuations because the regulator guarantees that the outage will
be long enough to keep your PC off if your PC is affected. That
might not be law, but it has worked that way here.