Sree's Thoughts on Prepping for Power Outages
Thursday, May 24, 2001

All the attention being given to power outages in California has raised the questions: Will our area face the same situation and what should be do to protect ourselves and our expensive equipment?

Of course, we don't know if we are in for any power outages here in the New York City area, but you can never be too careful.

My tips:

BUY A SURGE PROTECTOR: Seems obvious enough, but it is crucial that your systems, whether they are desktops or laptops, along with printers and scanners, are connected to a surge protector. These start at about $20 and go up from there.

CONSIDER UPS SYSTEM: No, not the package company. UPS stands for Uninterruptible Power Supply and is sort of a battery backup. It allows you to save your immediate work and shut off safely in the event of power outage. These are more expensive, but worth looking into for a home office. For example, APC makes relatively inexpensive ones that start at around $70.

BACKUP, BACKUP, BACKUP: In case your computer does get toasted, the best thing you can do is pray that you made backups of your critical data. So now is the time to make those backups. In addition to backing files on floppy disks, I would recommend using a Zip drive (starting at $80) and indvidual Zip disks (around $10 each) that can story about 50 times that of a floppy. If you are really tech savvy, you can use a rewritable CD-ROM drive.

You may want to look at what they have in California warning to warn consumers of impending blackouts. At Incident.com, you tell the site where you live and it will send an alert to your e-mail or pager when the next set of scheduled blackouts is on its way. Hopefully, we will never reach that stage.

Send your feedback -- and ideas for coverage: techguru@sree.net

 

Sree's Site of The Week

How Stuff Works
http://www.howstuffworks.com/

Leave it to a man named Brain to come up with a site that explains how stuff works. Marshall Brain (yes, that's his real name) has built a site that explains, literally, how stuff works -- in all sorts of categories.

This is fun and useful for people of all ages. For example, teachers will find it helpful in explaining tough concepts to students.

Each question is explained in simple, easy-to-understand terms and there are illustrations and links out to other sites as appropriate.

Among the questions I liked:

http://www.howstuffworks.com/

o o o o o

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