For what it is worth I have had a lot of dealings with Re-
Boot IT (http://www.rebootit.com.au/). Their service is dependable, the products are good, yes, a lot of them are refurbished, but I have never had a problem with them.
If you're getting a UPS (good idea btw) watch out for the cheap chinese knock offs. Unreliable for a starter and the power surge protection is minimal at best. Plus they use crud batteries, short life and poor charging characteristics.
Pick a known brand, Eaton or APC are best in the consumer field, 500-750 watts. They have rated protection, decent batteries and well designed ( think safe ! ) electronics and converters. $100- $200 would probably be a price guess and it will last for 3-5 years before batteries need replacing.
My wife is the NZ 'guru' over here on UPS's and her company sees cheap chinese knockoffs regularly with short outs and failed componentry. She sells mostly Eaton hardware but is well known in the industry. The chinese stuff just gets binned, not worth fixing and parts are just about totally unavailable anyway.
Hi Brent and Sara
Thanks for the info regarding UPS which I may have reason to consider in future. However, we rarely have blackouts, one reason being is that we are on the same line as a nursing home and they try to limit power outages to it.
During the recent bad weather we did have an outage of a few hours and
I noticed that the switching or whatever was pretty "dirty" with the lights
going a bit dim momentarily and the power flickered on an off before it finally went dead. This killed off my PC and printer - not so bad as both were due for replacement! I did however also invest in a reasonably expensive power surge protector which has power surge and spike protection including EMI/RFI filtering.
Cheers Peter
Check out MSY Technology. Their components are hard to beat for price but they also do complete boxes.
Have you thought about building you own? You can get exactly what you want that way. I've done two now. Best PC's I've ever had!
Hi Chris
Thanks for the suggestion. No I have never built my own PC but I did see in another thread where members were using micro (?) computers to shrink down their astro control for portability. Certainly building something yourself would be an interesting project and provide a good insight into its operation. Some years ago I built a house alarm using hardware logic circuits which I progressively refined to avoid false alarms etc. It now works fine over very long periods without the false alarms that some of my neighbors experience.
All good fun!
Cheers Peter
