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Power Picks

Both models from APC earned a Best Buy award for their combination of great software, excellent features, and reasonable price. The Back-UPS RS 800VA was our favorite. This slender, good-looking tower is relatively tall but should tuck away under most desks--and its size translates into outstanding run time: The RS 800VA sustained our power-hungry test PC (an Alienware system with a 19-inch monitor) for just over 29 minutes. Our gripes were relatively minor: The unit lacks surge protection for a coaxial connection, and installing the monitoring cables is a little fiddly.

APC's Back-UPS ES 725 Broadband is our other Best Buy pick. At $75, it's much cheaper than its bigger, more powerful cousin but still powered our test system for almost 16 minutes. The unit offers plenty of places to plug things in--eight power sockets in total.

We saw some other worthy contenders, though. Tripp Lite's $75 Internet 750U powered our test PC for over 16 minutes, a long time for a relatively small and low-cost device. Powercom's King Office KOF-575S powered our test system for only 5 minutes, 15 seconds. However, that's still long enough to save and shut down, and the KOF-575S is the cheapest model we tested--just $45. (If you have a less-powerful system than our test setup and a smaller CRT display or an LCD monitor, you'll get a longer run time.)

Hibernation Time

Both of the APC models use APC's PowerChute Personal Edition software, which is exceptionally easy to install and operate. It can use Windows XP's hibernation feature (Belkin's Bulldog Plus software also supports this), where all running programs are saved to disk and then restored when you reboot. We encountered some problems with the UPS programs that don't support hibernation; while they were able to force Microsoft Word and Excel to save the open document and close (so no data was lost), they didn't always close other applications properly, which could lead to lost data.

Tripp Lite bundles its PowerAlert software with its UPSs, and while that program provides ample information on the state of the battery, it's not quite as intuitive as APC's PowerChute. PowerWare's LanSafe 5 is powerful and intuitive to use, but provides little guidance through the confusing installation process.

PowerWare's stylish but pricey PW5115 tower is designed more for the business set than for home users: It provides ethernet and phone-line surge protection, plus some nice high-end features, such as built-in battery-health testing. We liked the PowerWare PW3110's widely spaced outlets, which easily accommodate AC adapters, but it suffers the same software installation hassles as the PW5115.

Tripp Lite's $180 OmniVS1000 offers two integrated 6-inch, battery-backed extension cords that keep even the biggest AC adapters from interfering with other outlets. However, you can't turn it off while it's plugged into the AC--a deal-killer if you want to use the UPS as an easy way to turn off your PC and connected peripherals via one switch.

The Belkin F6C750-AVR has a tower case, but its AC outlets are positioned on top, and the adapters we used didn't sit comfortably in that location.

One point to keep in mind: All the vendors offer other versions of the products we review here, with different features and battery capacities. If none of the units we tested seems quite suited to your needs, do some research to find out what other models are available and what they offer.