A client asked: Do I need a surge protector? If the power goes out sometime, what happens w/ the computer?

A surge protector is very important for protecting computers and other electronic equipment from damaging electrical spikes and surges. Fortunately this client already had one. Read the rest of the comments I wrote to her explaining the difference and dispelling the confusion surrounding surge protection and uninterruptible power supplies:

Perhaps you were thinking of an uninterruptible power supply (”UPS”, not to be confused with the brown trucks, of course). There are essentially two types of UPSes. One keeps a battery charged, and if it detects that the power goes out, then it switches over to the battery. It usually takes a few milliseconds to switch over. That may sound very fast to a human, but when computers operate in the millisecond (or faster) range, it can seem like quite a while. The second type of UPS has an Automatic Voltage Regulator (AVR) that charges a battery to continually run the computer. When the power goes out, the battery stops charging, but the equipment never feels a disruption. Your computer receives a continuous supply of pristine electricity. Naturally the second type costs a bit more.

UPSes are rated in VA’s (volt-amps) and Joules. Basically with VA’s, the bigger the number the longer your equipment will run during a power outage. Joules are more commonly touted with surge protectors, but they apply to UPSes, too. Again, the bigger the number, the better the protection against spikes and surges—even nearby lightning strikes in high-end ones.

One thing you generally don’t want to do is plug a surge protector into a UPS—at least into a low-end UPS. A normal electrical current cycles smoothly like an ocean wave from high to low and back again. Output from low-end UPSes (even ones with AVRs) usually produce electrical currents shaped more like square speed bumps. Square waves do not hurt your electronics, but they can cause problems if you plug a surge protector into a square-wave output UPS.

To summarize:

1. [The client has] a pretty darn good surge protector, so [the client is] protected from spikes and surges.
2. [The client is] not protected from sags and brown-outs (minor and major dips in the power), and certainly [the client is] not protected from power failures.
3. Bad power (especially spikes and full-power failures) cause the majority of computer data corruption. Data being written to a disk as the power spikes can be garbled. Drives writing to a disk during an outage, though rare, can write gibberish across the surface of the disk as they spin down (it happened to a computer I used to work on).
4. A UPS of any type will help protect you from complete power outages. UPSes with AVR will also effectively filter out sags and brownouts because the computer is always running on the battery. Non-AVR UPSes kick in when power drops below a certain point (some brown-outs are enough; some aren’t), and there’s always a slight delay, so you ever so slightly risk some data loss (it really depends on how sensitive your particular computer is to low-voltage situations—some are touchy; some don’t seem to notice).
5. It is okay to plug a UPS into a surge protector, but you should never plug a surge protector into a UPS unless the UPS produces pure sine-wave output (which consumer-grade UPSes will not).
6. Only critical devices (computer and monitor in [the client’s] case; possibly the printer) should be plugged into the battery powered part of the UPS. Other peripherals (notably speakers, laser printers, and anything non-critical) should be plugged into the non-battery protected part of the UPS or a regular surge protector. That way, you might lose your audio (speakers powered off), but you have maximum run-time for safely shutting down your computer and monitor.
7. Paying a little more for a UPS which can communicate to your PC and tell it to shut down if the power goes out can be very helpful if you aren’t home when the power goes out.

My thanks go to Brett for his comments posted on Ed Bott’s blog about Dell’s hidden restore partitions.

I originally posted this message in the comments, but it was too long and got cut off midway. Here is the complete message, including some interesting utilities and tools I found within the Ghost Recovery Console built into some new Dell Dimension 1100 computers. This article is fairly technical and probably only of interest to other techies.

Here is the information from some Dell Dimension 1100’s purchased earlier this month. According to Windows, here are the partitions:

1: 31MB FAT EISA (Diagnostic Utilities)
2: 52.71GB NTFS System (Main data partition)
3: 18.51GB NTFS Backup (Ghost Backup uses this)
4: 3.26GB FAT32 Unknown (Dell’s Recovery image)

(Don’t you love how the “80GB” HDD only has 52GB of usable space?)

According to PTEdit32:

[code]Type, Boot, Start Cyl, Hd, Sct, End Cyl, Hd, Sct, Before, Sectors

DE, 00, 0, 1, 1, 3, 254, 63, 63, 64197
07, 80, 4, 0, 1, 1023, 254, 63, 64260, 110543265
07, 00, 1023, 0, 1, 1023, 254, 63, 110607525, 38813040
DB, 00, 1023, 0, 1, 1023, 254, 63, 149420565, 6827625, 6827625
[/code]
As in Bret’s case, the utility and recovery partitions were set to invalid types (DE and DB respectively). Using PTEdit32 (which allows you to make changes from within Windows XP; very cool!), I changed the types to 04 (FAT 16 <32MB) and 0C (FAT32) respectively. After rebooting the computer, the volumes showed up as ordinary drives in Windows (drives F: and G: to be exact).

It was very easy then to see what information was inside the partitions. Pretty much exactly what you would expect: system diagnostics and recovery utilities and a bootable recovery version of Ghost.

The process was completely reversible. I just changed the types back to DE and DB, rebooted, and everything was back to normal. Obligatory WARNING Statement: I am a certified network engineer with nearly 20 years of experience; I kind of know what I’m doing when it comes to this stuff. I also didn’t have any data on the computer that would matter if it were lost. If that doesn’t describe your situation, then please be very, very, very careful if you try this yourself. One tiny mistake (or just a bit of bad luck), and your hard drive could end up ruined, along with the data that used to be on it.

Just for curiosity’s sake, I booted into the recovery system. The EULA from Symantec states:

There are technological measures in this Software that are designed to prevent unlicensed or illegal use of the Software. You agree that Symantec may use these measures to protect Syantec against software piracy. This Software may contain enforcement technology that limits the ability to install and uninstall the Software on a computer to not more than a finite number of times for a finite number of computers. …

(Any typos in the preceding are my own, as is the added emphasis.)

I realize that basically this (much longer) paragraph appears to mainly be discussing Windows Activation, but the thing that worries me (or would if I was relying on this to recover my system), is just how many times can I recover my computer before the software refuses to restore it anymore?

I have friends who as a matter of policy reformat their hard drives every few months. (Apparently they find this easier than taking proper care of their computers in the first place with antimalware software, etc., but that’s a whole other discussion.) Would they suddenly be informed that they had exceeded the “finite” number of reinstallations and could no longer recover their PCs? At least with a CD-ROM (or DVD) you can recover as often as you want without relying upon time-bombmed (well, counter bombed would probably be the more accurate analogy) technology.

One interesting feature of the recovery system is that if you go under “Utilities” you can Delete the Backup Drive. Essentially it removes the D: drive (partition 3 above) and extends the C: drive (partition 2) into the freed-up space. That’s a pretty cool feature I’m sure a lot of people would love to know about.

Another sweet feature (or set of features) is you can 1) configure and enable networking, 2) browse and mount the file systems, and 3) attach to network drives, and 4) theoretically recover lost files from a corrupted or infected disk without having to use BartPE or any other recovery tools. There’s also Norton Disk Doctor, an Antivirus scanner, and some other tools that could be useful in some situations. There’s even a Symantec Thin Client available. While I still like having a CD-ROM or DVD-ROM for recovery, I do have to admit there are some cool features hidden away here.

After all this, I now plan to keep the 31MB EISA partition as-is, since it can be sort of handy at times. But the recovery partition is more of a liability than a blessing. In part because of the whole finite number of recoveries and also since it could theoretically wipe out all the customizations that I plan to make to the system. I’m just going to remove it, along with the non-hidden backup partition, and extend the main partition into all that lovely freed-up space. I have other ways of performing backups that I’m much happier with.

Preventive Maintenance Helps Safeguard Data
Most of our clients find the information stored on the hard disk is much more important than the hardware that stores the data. Taking steps to protect this information makes sense. That is what preventive maintenance is all about.
Preventive Maintenance Improves Security
Regular virus and spyware scanning is critical to keeping your data safe. Security patches and software updates are released several times each month for a variety of software. Some notify you, but others do not. All are important if you wish to stay protected. System and security logs give a wealth of information about the state of the equipment and the network. By checking the logs, we often spot potential problems early and avoid emergencies by fixing problems before they become noticeable.
Preventive Maintenance Improves Performance
Some aspects of computer systems degrade in performance over time. This has even given rise to the colorful term of “Windows rot“. Preventive maintenance helps improve the overall speed of system and network performance in these respects.
Preventive Maintenance Saves Money
You’ve heard the old adage “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” It may be trite, but it’s also true. Avoiding problems saves you money in the long run, compared with laying out cash for new components or repair jobs. Emergency repair procedures can consume your IT budget at alarming rates. Most preventive maintenance procedures are quite simple, compared to troubleshooting and emergency repair procedures. This saves you much time (and stress!).