Interesting Internet stats

››› SOUTH AFRICA

ZA - 43,997,828 population - Country Area: 1,219,090 sq km

5,100,000 Internet users Sept/06, 11.6% of the population, per ITU.

165,300 broadband internet subscribers as of Sept/07, per ITU.

http://www.internetworldstats.com/africa.htm#za

posted by Rob Peter Verhagen @ 12:56 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

The power is off what now?

What you want is an Uninterruptible Power Supply, or UPS.

Before the power goes off again...

UPS technology has come a long way and there are solutions that range from shoe-box-sized battery housings that juice your computer for half an hour to giant trolley-like things that can keep your television, decoder, Xbox, toaster, blender and microwave going all night, sans Eskom.

There are three kinds of UPS:

The first is your offline, or ‘standby` UPS, these are very cheap and will probably only give you enough time to shut down everything, fifteen minutes or so. It`s not very effective, because there is a brief interruption in the power supply when the device switches to battery, but hey it helps.

The second is your ‘line-interactive` device : this uses a bi-directional inverter, which provides uninterrupted power to the output of the UPS and uses a portion of AC power to keep its battery charged. When the input power fails, the transfer switch disconnects the AC input and the battery-inverter combination provides output power.

The third is the the ‘online` UPS, where devices continue to be powered of of the battery which is being constantly charged by the mains.

Cost:
You can buy a UPS for under R1 000 that will power a single computer for half an hour, long enough to back up your work or save your game and shut down gracefully. For around R5 000, you can get a device that will provide up to eight hours of power for a few devices – say a gaming console and a big LCD. More than that and you`re powering your whole house and putting a generator in a shed to boot.

So what you want to do is consult your manufacturer`s guide and figure out how much power a product uses. Add this up for each device and then make sure that the combined amount does not exceed 80 percent of what the UPS can handle – 600W in this case.

In terms of a small UPS for a single computer, a 600VA/360W UPS will power a single PC with a 17” monitor.

posted by Rob Peter Verhagen @ 11:34 AM 0 Comments Links to this post