battery back up

[mgs15]

Do I need a battery back up for my new PC or will surge protection suffice. Or is the company just trying to get extra money out of me?

[rojash]

It depends on what you use your PC for, and on the quality of the local electricity supply. A UPS (battery backup) gives you time to save all your work and close down the machine properly in the event of a power failure.

Where I live (Kefalonia, Greece) we get a lot of "brown outs" where the voltage dips dramatically without actually failing. A number of these in rapid succession can cause the computer to switch itself on and off rapidly, which can result in all sorts of damage, to (e.g.) Motherboard, memory,hard drive, power supply.

I couldn't live without my UPS.