Desktops with built-in battery backup

Since moving back to India from the US, one of the things I have had to adapt to are the frequent power cuts. Demand far outstripping supply, most states' electricity boards (the equivalent of the utility company in the US) cut power to different parts of the city at different times of the day. Oftentimes these power cuts are not according to a schedule, so uncertainty reigns supreme.

This uncertain power supply poses a problem for desktop computers—without a proper (clean) shutdown/hibernate/standby, computers running modern-day OSes may experience problems. While a UPS will keep a desktop running for a while in the event of a power failure, when the batteries are about to run out, you still have to manually shutdown/hibernate your computer. Why? Because the UPS has no way of telling the desktop that it is about to run out of juice, and therefore the desktop has no way of knowing when to automatically shut itself down.

The very same situation poses no problem in a laptop computer because it has an integrated battery and the requisite electronic circuits to tell the OS when the battery reaches a "critical" charge level—then the OS can shut down or hibernate the laptop.

Now you may think this is unnecessary whining—after all, the UPS provides an adequate safety net—but what about when one is away? How does the computer shut itself down when the UPS' battery runs out in that situation? To err on the side of caution, you have to keep your desktop computer off whenever you're away from it... and that is not a happy solution at all!

So desktop computers should also have a battery backup and the requisite circuitry to let the OS know when the battery reaches a critical level—just like in a laptop. The aim here is not to enable hours of un-tethered computing—so the backup battery doesn't need to be very big or expensive—but simply to guarantee a safe/clean shutdown every time.

The solution I have outlined above is pretty simple and would not cost PC manufacturers much money to implement. My word of advice to them would be to use standardized batteries—in the hyper-price-sensitive Indian market, the prospect of replacing costly proprietary batteries would make such a solution a very hard sell.

Huh? How's that pronounced again?

आईडिया-शाईडिया -- that's how this blog's name is supposed to be pronounced. That's it, that's all this first post is about—how to pronounce the name of this blog. Irrespective of where you are in the world, there's probably a Hindi-speaker somewhere near you, so get them to tell you how to pronounce this :-).

This double-barreled name comes from the Punjabi habit of double-barreling just about anything, kind of making it more generic that what the specific word means. For example, while the word "idea" means what you understand it to mean—idea—"idea-shidea" kinda stands for idea/brainstorm/hypothesis etc., all in one go. Almost anything that even remotely resembles coherent thought can be an idea-shidea. Pretty neat, eh ;-)?