Monsoon season starts about this time of year (May) in kerala. A monsoon is a tropical wind that blos continuously. More information about monsoons can be found on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsoon

Its normal practice in India to use surge protectors to protect against power surges during storms and power surges during regular use as well. Within a few weeks of reaching India I purchased a 500VA/200W UPS to protect my computer system. While the UPS couldn't support plugging in a 17 inch CRT (issues were caused during boot up where more power was needed by the system during boot up than the UPS could channel leading to BIOS error,) it was more than enough to protect all the components inside the computer casing and a DSL Modem.

I thought the computer system was safe against everything apart from a direct lightning strike. A few days ago on the 30th of May 2008 I was proven wrong. I was relaxing online paying an MMORPG called Guild Wars during a relatively light storm when all of a sudden I saw a flash of lightning and then my system froze with color degradation on the screen.

I thought that was just another electrical surge but I had a feeling there was more to it thatn that since the colors on the screen were off (apparently the same can be reproduced by holding a very powerful magnet near a CRT monitor.)

On rebooting the motherboard threw up a BIOS error (I haven't seen a BIOS error in over a year which was when I last plugged in the monitor into the UPS) saying there was a chassis (cabinet) intrusion. I thought OK let see what another reboot would do. The reboot fixed the error however when I saw the usual windows desktop, I noticed the colors were off. I either reconnected the D-SUB cable at the back of the computer or I switched the monitor on and off to get rid of the color changes as it appeared to be caused by static left over by a power fluctuation.

On reboot tings went fine except that the skype helper kept popping up and the internet seemed to be down. Fine I thought, probably just the ISP needs to fix a few things up, the lightning strike that caused my system to freeze could have probably affected them too (that assumption wasn't that far from the truth.)

Abot half an hour later I noticed the modem was powered off. Repeated attempts to switch it back on failed and I called the ISP to report it. The next day in the morning the technicians arrived (the lightning strike happened at night the previous day) and said that not only the power of the modem was out, the built in LAN on my motherboard was not working as well. I had a spare network card already in the system and they connected the replacement modem to that one instead.

Reading up on what caused the strike, it seems that lightning struck the phone line that goes into the modem and from the modem it travelled into the NIC on the motherboard. I assume the lightning strike was close enough to affect the monitor because I'd rather have that than find out the surge travelled from the modem into the motherboard and onto the video card and then into the monitor thereby meanng every component of my system was affected. Thankfully sticking to brand name parts saved me from having a totally inoperable computer (I do have a spare system if such a thing happened but a blown hard disk could mean a days worth of lost work or however long till my last backup of work files to another HDD)

Anyways to protect against lightning surged through the phone line (leaving the system off wouldn't have made a difference as the surge would have gotten into the unprotected phone line port on the modem and onto then from the modem onto motherboard anyway) I got myself a new UPS (http://www.apcc.com/resource/include/techspec_index.cfm?base_sku=BR1000%...) with data line protection. Now I can not only run the monitor during power outages and storms, the entire system has one extra defense against power surges as all the external wiring (power and phone line) has to get into the UPS before it gets into the rest of the system.

I highly recommend a UPS with data line protection to everybody who depends on their computer to earn a living especially to those who are connected to the internet (who isn't these days) as most internet connections use a regular phone line, which is exposed to lightning surges just as much as the normal power line, to connect their computer to the internet.