not my finest hour

[cellio]

Around 2:30 last night I was awakened by the siren song of under-nourished UPSs. (Out of phase with each other, of course, just to maximize the pain. But hey, I will never have to worry about sleeping through a power outage...) First I waited in case it was another power hiccup, but after several minutes I got up to shut down my computer.

Like everyone else I have an assortment of electricity-demanding computer stuff, but the UPS only fuels the CPU and monitor. (The external hard drive spends most of its time sleeping anyway, so it can fend for itself.) Bleary-eyed in the dark I sat down at my computer. I wiggled the mouse -- nothing. I tried the keyboard -- nothing again.

Oops, I thought -- when I bought the wireless keyboard and mouse, did that perchance involve a powered doohickey of some sort? Why yes, now that you mention it... Ok, fine -- I found the laptop bag and the mouse therein by the glow of the monitor and plugged it in. Strictly speaking I didn't need a keyboard for this.

I had just clicked on the apple on my way to the "shutdown" menu item when the battery decided it had had enough of me. Oops -- not my best timing. Well, now I have a slightly better idea of what the battery can manage -- about 8 minutes for a Mac Mini and a 20" LCD monitor. I had higher hopes.

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/merle_/]

That has been my general experience with UPSes: they last just long enough to irritate you. But at least you can save your work if you have files open.

I especially love trying to cleanly shutdown Windows servers at work. The UPS is screaming at you, and Windows happily says that it is shutting down (with the hard drive thrashing) for five minutes until the power goes out on it.

[cellio]

Yeah, the primary function of the UPS is to defend against an outage when I'm right there and in the middle of something, and in that case I don't need 10 minutes. But I do leave the computer on all the time (occasionally doing something long overnight, but not usually), and I figure a clean shutdown is better than not. I don't know how much of a problem that is for the Mac versus Windows; maybe I'm just perpetuating now-irrelevant folklore. But so long as there's still a disk in there spinning, I figure I'll try to play it safe.