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

[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.