how detrimental are power surges and sudden outages to a computer? i know that a sudden power surge or voltage spikes can destroy the hardware, which is why i have a tripplite surge suppressor, but how much good will it do?
and on the other extreme, is a sudden power outage that bad for a computer?
thanks all for answering to my curiosity. 
well a power outage is bad mainly because your hard drives dont get a chance to 'shutdown' and the heads that read the data of the disk could scratch the surfave of the disk leaving a bad spot on the HD. That ans the fact you dont get to save what your working on. As far a power spikes are concerned, they are realy uncommon. Your house breakers, if its a realy big surge will get it right away. If its a little spike your powersupply will take most of the blunt of the voltage, but what left can cripple your PC. It is my opinion that uninteruptible powersupplys are usless, and a wast of money for the average user. Just marketing towards our fears.
yeah, i see what you mean about power spikes, and with the power outages affecting hard drives, but an occasional outage probably won't hurt the drive, right? i mean, there is no way of even preparing for such an unexpected event.
It could hurt the HDD, its happened to me, the power source died on me once, so i bought a new one, i installed it and the HDD was damaged because it had been suddently stopped while writting.... one of the boot sectors so... TADAAAAAAAAAA.. new HDD for me and a UPS hehehhe
ooh, that sucks, but you got a new one! yay!
i was just wondering because today, i was so out of it, i accidentally unplugged the wrong surge suppressor and cut the power to my computer. what a silly mistake, but everything seems to be fine.
pfffffffffeeeeeeeeeeeewww!
You could have made a mess hehehe...
*sings* too much internet will kill you... if you cant make up your miiind...*sings*
:naughty:
yeah, i'm pretty lucky. i could've fried this mobo when i accidentally swapped the usb headers. pin 1 + ground is bad!
hard drive seems fine, though, so i guess i shouldn't worry, but i am. scary mistake. 
:cry:
nice song there.
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