My UPS Hates XP
This story is from a while ago but I’m just getting around to putting it in my journal.
The weirdest thing happened to me when I was installing XP on my home machine. The install CD had just copied all it’s files to my computer and it was getting ready to boot itself into XP for the first time. When it shuts down for the reboot, my UPS started beeping as if the power had gone out and it was running on battery! Well, I hadn’t touched the computer… I wasn’t even sitting at the desk when it happened. I climbed underneath and verified that all the wires were ok…. I unplugged and replugged the UPS… all the while, XP is starting up for the first time on the computer.
There was nothing I could do! The UPS believed itself to be unplugged! I’ve got about 20 minutes of power on the batteries so I took the very first opportunity to power off the computer and then power cycle the UPS. The UPS was fine after that. Totally weird.
Now consider what happened…. The UPS was connected to the computer only by a power cord… no serial cord… no USB. So how did the UPS know that XP was coming? Did XP do something horrible to the power supply? No, that’s impossible, isn’t it? Bear in mind that this has never happened in the 6 years I’ve owned the UPS and hasn’t happened since. And that it happened at the exact moment I was switching over from 2000 to XP.
Weird.