Once upon a time Christopher D. Heer shaped the electrons to say... > > Better yet buy a UPS (uninterruptible power supply, aka battery backup). > > This will smooth out the supply and also let TiVo keep running (for a finite > But the UPS suggestion is nevertheless a good one in terms of bridging power > drops, etc.
Thirded. All of my TiVos are on UPSes. In fact, my entire A/V system - 2 TiVos, TV, receiver, LD/DVD/CD player, & VCR - are connected to a couple of UPSes. I used to have 4 smaller UPSes, but I picked up a couple of larger capacity boxes at Best Buy when they had a good sale earlier this year. The TiVos in my room are still on an old box. I do this for a few reasons: 1. Cleans up dirty power. 2. Once in a while, such as during a storm, the power can flicker. That's bad for devices, and can be enough to reboot TiVos. UPSes allow the stack to ride it out smoothly. 3. Even longer outages can lose recordings - now the TiVos can keep recording at least as long as the UPS lasts, which is generally long enough for the power to come back. 4. Some surge protection. Now that I own a home I plan to have a whole-home UPS installed, but I have a few things higher on the To Do list in fixing up the house before I get to that. Whole home systems provide the best power conditioning and surge protection. Since I live in a city, I'm not too worried about long outages. If I lived in a more rural location I'd also have a backup generator installed. I also concur about the shutdown. The only real power down for a TiVo is pulling the plug. They were designed for that. So you don't need to do anything special. > One of my best friends used to work at a computer rental agency > (which his father owned) eons ago. Several years back Inacom bought > them, but they were interested in the customer base and not the old > equipment. As a result my friend ended up with (amongst other > things) forty or fifty APS brand UPS units. He proceeded to connect > every electrical device in his small apartment to one. Heh. I did something similar. From 2000-2001 I worked for a startup. In 2001, when the bubble popped, they started laying people off and eventually went out of business. Along the way they had a big asset sale to recoup some of the money they'd spent as they'd grown. I got a bunch of friends together and we hit like a horde of locusts. We bought every UPS they had - 40-odd - for $20 each. I had a huge stack of them - I sold/gave away a bunch, but the old UPSes I still have are from that stack. We also bought any decent monitors - 21 & 19 inch units, some laptops, some full systems, etc. We carted off a load of stuff. That was one of the few good things about the tech bubble bursting - there were a lot of companies selling off good stuff for pennies on the dollar. -MZ -- <URL:mailto:megazoneatmegazone.org> Gweep, Discordian, Author, Engineer, me. "A little nonsense now and then, is relished by the wisest men" 508-852-2171 <URL:http://www.megazone.org/> <URL:http://www.eyrie-productions.com/> Eris
