"well it might just save your ass"

A ups is as necessary as any other part of your pc. It WILL save your pc at some point from being cooked!

Here in Sri Lanka, an UPS is much more important than a GeForce4!

We get power cuts very often, say, once a week or may be trice an hour!

I've got a LEUMS 500VA a cheap little fella, but I can use it upto 15 minutes because the energy comsumption of my PC is very low compared to those biggie AthlonXPs or Intel P4s. So, I can always shut the computer down in time, if the power failure is more than expected.

UPS are always great for Uninterrupted Power Supply (what UPS really means :lol:)
I haven't faced a sudden power failure here in Australia and not using a UPS atm. It is on its way to here after next year :)

@Bads_1, your UPS is great! APCC UPS are built-in supported in Windwos XP and Windows 2000, and will be easy to configure!

Hmm. I've only been using a surge suppressor for the past 5 years that I've owned my PC. Had it on during storms...and pretty much 24/7 (except when I go out of town). I guess I've been lucky so far!

I WILL be getting an UPS when I buy/build my new computer in a few months. Right now, I'm still trying to make a decision on chipset/motherboard to go with.

I'm curious as to WHY people think these are necessary? The only thing they give in addition to good surge suppression is temporary uninterruption in power supply. If you have decent power supply in your area, the chances are very slim that a power surge will cause damage. A standard surge suppressor will handle almost anything including lightning. Most likely to happen would be a power outage during a disk process like writing to hard disk or probably the worst would be while flashing firmware, bios, etc. They are indeed nice of you do a lot of flashing and have many brown outs/power outages, but hardly necessary. I have a good surge suppressor with maximum suppression you can get and $100,000 damage insurance with it, so if in the very slim likelyhood anything did happen, I would be getting a FREE computer upgrade. :P :lol: :D