Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I want to start by saying that I love the little LCD display with the ability to see how many watts I'm using and the remaining battery time (both without needing to install any software). However, 1) Both the box and their website say typical runtime up to 170 minutes. I don't want to call it False Advertising, but it's certainly misleading. I've now plugged in two of these units and, after fully charged, the highest remaining battery time is 100 minutes. That's with nothing plugged in so it could never be greater than 100 minutes. In my case, I have a Dell Dimension 8250 and an LG 24" LCD (turned down to 4% brightness which significantly reduces power consumption). My system uses 144 watts and I get 39 minutes of backup time. That's better than I got with my previous, similarly priced APC model. However, 144 watts is like two light bulbs and it's sad that the modern state of personal UPSes can only power two light bulbs for 39 minutes, and I paid $170 for this. 2) There's no way to completely silence the alarms. First, if the unit's battery is completely drained, you have to remember to manually silence the alarms again when you turn it back on (unless you install their software). Second, even after you do this, the alarms will still sound during the last fifteen to twenty minutes of battery life. As far as I can tell there's NO WAY to prevent this, not on the UPS and not with the software. You can silence the initial alarms, but not the final ones. My request to all UPS manufacturers: consider the people who buy UPSes that cost less than $200 -- mainly home users and possibly small businesses. These UPSes are not located in a corporate data center, these are in homes where people sleep. The last thing I care about in the middle of the night is if the power goes out. I certainly don't want my UPS to wake up the whole family. Please give us an easy way to permanently silence all alarms, without needing to install any software, and that continue to remain always silent, no matter what. Even a DIP switch would be great. 3) I wouldn't count on using the telephone/coax surge-suppressing jacks on this unit. Maybe they'll work for you, maybe not. I couldn't use the telephone jack because it created a lot of noise on the phone line (FWIW I don't have DSL either). I also couldn't use the coax jack. Actually I was using it for several days in the beginning, but then a couple of techs from Comcast Cable showed up at my door and said they'd traced signal noise in my neighborhood to my house. They insisted that I remove the coax from this UPS. (FWIW they said this wouldn't matter because Comcast supposedly has surge protection outside of people's houses.) Despite my mixed feelings about this UPS, I would probably recommend and purchase this model again in the future because I haven't been able to find anything better in the market in this price range. It's the lesser of the evils. I've had too many problems with APC models, so I hope to avoid APC while their quality remains inferior.