Hey Gnomies, I’ve come up for air again. Been a while since my last post, I’ve been dealing with a lot, trying to sell my home in Chicago in a “down” real estate market has been an all consuming chore. And we’re still not quite there yet, although some recent activity has given us fresh hope.

Recently, my battery backup unit started to squawk that its internal battery was about kaput. I was not surprised, as I’ve been using this unit, an APC BE500U, for at least 2-3 years. It served its purpose, and while I suppose I could have just replaced the battery, I wanted to get a slightly more robust UPS.

APC made it relatively painless to replace, and even offered a small discount and free shipping label for sending back the old unit. After checking out its lineup of products, I opted for a BP500UC.

Once the new unit arrived, the only problem I had was of my own making — dealing with the spaghetti bowl of power and data cables that had formed around the old unit. I always resolve to do a better job of cable management, and I just never get around to it. But when I was setting up the new UPS, I did take a moment to clean up some of the cabling mess. The way I see it, I’m moving soon, and when I setup my home office and equipment in my new home in Tulsa, I am going to take special care to keep the cabling as “clean” and orderly as possible. I may also invest in a few more UPS units, as I have other CPUs and peripherals I’d like to have on battery backup.

For those folks that don’t have a UPS on their computers (especially desktops), I would strongly recommend one. The entry level models are not expensive, and they offer a lot better power surge protection than a simple $10 power strip, not to mention the primary feature of powering your rig via battery during a power outage and unattended shutdown via software agent.

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