Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I'm not quite ready to nominate it for MoMA's permanent collection, but the CyberPower CP1000AVRLCD does look a lot better than your average geekbox. In fact, it's the first UPS (uninterruptable power supply) I've ever owned that I can easily tolerate having on a corner of my desk, where it has now quietly buddied up with a stack of external LaCie drives (the drives and the UPS all have round blue power-on indicators). The CyberPower features a three-inch front-panel readout, backlit in (what else?) blue, that, with each consecutive push of the oversized display button, tells you in big digits what the current load is, the voltage it receives from the wall outlet, the estimated run time, the total load capacity, the battery capacity, even how many minutes remain after a blackout occurs and the battery is running down. The display turns itself off after 20 or 30 seconds, so it's not too distracting (actually, the user should have the option of keeping the display on, but I suppose you can't have everything). When a blackout strikes, the CyberPower unit intermittently beeps to signal that the battery has kicked in -- but unlike other UPS's I've used, you can switch off the annoying beep in acknowledgment. I deduct points for the nine outlets being so closely spaced together that any device powered by a wallwart will take up two or even three spaces. Cyberpower also shortchanges Mac users by not giving them full-featured power management software. You can control the behavior of the battery backup through the Energy Saver control panel in OSX, which recognizes the brand and model of the UPS and lets you decide how you want to safely power down the computer and the other plugged-in devices in case of a blackout. So far so good. But the native Mac software won't let you instruct other applications to autosave and quit. That means unsaved documents will prevent applications from shutting down unless you're there to manage the process; and when the Cyberpower's battery depletes itself, the result will be the same as if you had no UPS to begin with -- the computer eventually shuts off as if you'd literally pulled the plug, and unsaved changes will be lost. Still, that's not a dealbreaker for me; long ago I've gotten into the habit of hitting command-S every couple of minutes when I'm working on a document. FWIW, the estimated battery run time of my configuration -- a 24-inch iMac with a 2.4Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo chip, plus three external drives -- is about 16 minutes. Oh yeah: the unit has a swappable battery and three-year warranty. Not too shabby. UPDATED, August 2012: It's still going strong. I just bought this product again, a second one, to plug in an extra computer and additional hard drives. Hope to have them for many more years -- ready to save my computer equipment from surges, blackouts, and brownouts at a fraction of a moment's notice.