When a computer suffers that kind of outage, a lockup or freeze can result. The screen may appear unchanged. Sometimes, the cursor can be moved around, but the computer won t respond otherwise. Brownouts rob computer memory modules of their ability to keep track of what s happening on the desktop. A power interruption of only a 50 billionth of a second can cause RAM chips to suffer amnesia.
Data loss can be complete and severe.
Even if a computer seems unaffected after the briefest of episodes, chances are that damage has occurred, Staples says. The heads inside a hard drive ping on the platters, and when they re doing that, they re making that hard drive worse as time goes on, he says. Eventually, you ll start losing data or the heads get defective and break completely. That s not to say that surge protectors alone are ineffective. However, unless users are plugging their Internet connections and all peripherals into the surge protector, damage can still occur.