If you do not use to unplug your computer from an electrical outlet during a thunderstorm, or if you do not take effective precautions, you should start worrying about it. You don't need to be an electrician to understand that when the light suddenly goes out or there is a voltage surge, electronic devices and computers can be damaged .
Most of the time nothing will happen, but the risk of breaking the computer when the light suddenly goes out remains very high and some precautions should be taken, especially now with the arrival of autumn and winter.
Blackouts are sudden power failures that tend to occur due to problems beyond our control (for example, damaged power lines) or also because of us, when, for example, there is a short circuit or an overload for too much energy consumed.
The drop in voltage that occurs when the electrical voltage has a temporary drop (visible from the dimming lights) and voltage surges also cause problems, when a device receives more energy than that intended for at least three nanoseconds.
The real danger of when the light goes out or when the voltage drops is that the computer turns off completely suddenly.
In these cases the computer's operating system does not follow its shutdown sequence by stopping all running processes and saving configurations and changes.
A sudden loss of electricity can interrupt important tasks that the computer was doing, ruining the disk's file system.
In fact, when a hard disk is working and writing a file and suddenly turns off, that file will be damaged.
If this file were a system file necessary to start the computer, it may no longer be possible to turn it on and you will have to try to restore it with a tedious and unpleasant procedure.
Frequent power outages can also ruin the hard disk .
The reading and writing head, which moves and vibrates over the rotating plates during operation, returns with a click to its original position in case of loss of power.
This sudden movement can cause small imperfections which, over time, increase the probability of definitive breakage that occurs when the head touches and scrapes the surfaces of the dishes destroying the hard disk.
SSD solid state drives that can suffer catastrophic damage due to sudden power outages are not saved either.
As for voltage surges, which can then precede the blackout, the biggest concern is represented by lightning .
Most of the houses are built with 120 volt power lines.
When a million-volt lightning bolt falls, it is obvious that the overhang would be so high that it literally fry any unprotected device.
On a computer, the component that is damaged first is the internal power supply.
The only surefire way to protect your computer against electrical anomalies would be to unplug it completely until the storm passes, but this is obviously not practicable.
However, there are at least two other effective alternative methods against electrical problems.
Against voltage surges, a surge protector can be used, an appliance that will attempt to deflect electrical surges away from connected devices.
Basically it is a multiple filtered socket with protection against overvoltage and lightning .
Personally I bought it on Amazon for less than 20 Euros, from Belkin, one of the best on the market.
The second solution, a little more expensive, is the purchase of an uninterruptible power supply or UPS, a device that contains an emergency battery that does not turn off the computer when the light goes out.
In addition to this, UPSs are also protected from voltage surges.
In another article I had already recommended this purchase by talking about how to use a UPS as a battery for the computer when the power is off .
