Average Customer Review: ( 47 customer reviews )
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95 of 97 found the following review helpful:
 Perfect for my application Jan 18, 2006
By Daniel H. Hamilton
"danham"
Before buying any UPS, do some homework. It's not as simple as reading the watts sticker on your computer. Get to know what volt-amps means and decide if you need lots of battery run time or not. I believe many people end up buying too much UPS capacity (which is fine if you can afford it) because mfgrs' "wizards" are not very accurate. This unit, with its fairly low rating, is fine for my needs:
My requirements are to protect my equipment from surges and sags, to give me enough time to save and shut down when the power fails, and to run my DSL modem and WiFi base station for a few hours off and on during an extended outage (we get hurricanes on Cape Cod). I do not need server-class UPS backup, meaning automated shutdown and lengthy run time.
This unit works great for all of the above. It would not run my iMac G4 for very long beyond an emergency shutdown, but that's fine in my case.
The supplied (and downloadable new versions) of Bulldog software are terrible, however. I did not downgrade the unit's star rating for that because you don't need it.
On my Mac, Bulldog only served to display annoying false warnings and would lose connection with the UPS whenever the computer sleeps. Don't even bother installing it.
66 of 66 found the following review helpful:
 OK, but not great Aug 31, 2006
By Jon T. Swanson
I've had mixed success with this UPS. If I unplug the UPS from
the wall, it switches to battery back-up just fine. However,
there have been several cases when the power flashed off for
a fraction of a second during a storm and the UPS went into
overload, the computer immediately shut down and I lost all
my work. I bought it to handle that latter situation and so it
has not been very useful to me. I e-mailed Belkin tech support
about this and they... well they never responded.
30 of 30 found the following review helpful:
 A tale of two UPS's Feb 08, 2008
By Patrick
I just returned my Belkin F6C550-AVR. I liked the form factor (tall with plugs on top) and the price/feature tradeoff looked great. I bought it and followed all the directions to a tee. But there was more to the story:
1) Smell - the chemical smell this thing gives off when charging is noxious. It gave me a headache. I'm not exaggerating.
2) Wasteful - Even when nothing is plugged into it and it's fully charged, it draws 18 watts, as measured by my Kill-A-Watt. That's like leaving a CFL lightbulb on 24/7.
3) Software - The software installs under the name "Automatic Power Management Software". The Belkin website calls it "Bulldog v2" I call it "Bulls#!t". It was apparently written in China by people who know nothing of common UI idioms. It eats up too much space on disk. It is buggy. For example, the "load" was shown as 22%, which made me think it was sized with plenty of headroom. Then I unplugged it to test it, and the load reading jumped up to 43%. Oops. Furthermore, it does not tell you the really useful info: how many minutes remain, what's the current charge level of the battery, What's the current input voltage, etc. What's worse is that it has an administrator password, which gives you access to change things, but the login didn't work! It would accept my blank password (as per the manual) but then would immediate revert back to "read only" mode. So many of the features were not accessible. And did I mention the UI sucked?
So what did I do? Like a good engineer, I researched the alternatives and bought the CyberPower CP850AVRLCD. A little more expensive but *much* more usable, and higher capacity too. It only draws 7 watts when turned off, it doesn't stink up the room, it has a beautiful LCD screen which gives you status, and the software actually works. Plus it gives you status on the useful info, so you actually will know the thing is wearing out before you have your next outage.
To be fair, some people might like the Belkin unit. The mechanical design isn't bad and the price is right. And the software, while half-baked, attempts to include enterprise functions which would be great if you could get them to work. In short, if you plan to use it in the garage or server closet where the smell doesn't matter, you don't mind fighting with the software, you don't care to know the status of the unit, and you're OK with wasting 18 watts constantly, then this could work. Otherwise, I'd look at CyberPower, APC, and Tripp-Lite. Good luck.
49 of 53 found the following review helpful:
Reliable, fairly Compact and streamlined, Plugins easy to get to. Aug 31, 2005
By G. Richardson
I own three Belkin Battery Backups, two are the older model that have the plugins on the back. This model has the plugins on the top which is a plus because these things are HEAVY. It's also a step up cosmetically being streamlined as opposed to boxy. I don't use the "Belkin Bulldog" software that comes with them because neither myself or my wife do much word processing although I would say that the software is simple to use and is a step up from the APC stuff that never worked for me. I never could get Windows to recognize the APC and one of them actually failed. This software installs easily and runs inconspicuously in the background, but I don't need it so uninstalled it. It serves as a reliable battery backup during power failure that happens regularly as we live out in the desert and there are a lot of storms. I wish there were more plugins (only four battery backup/surge protector and two surge protector only) but a couple of triple splitters solves that.
12 of 12 found the following review helpful:
 dissappointed May 14, 2007
By C. Hughes
When the power goes off and the back-up battery runs down, the unit shuts down and does not re-start when power comes back on. This leaves everything plugged into it also without power until you return and reset the unit. This makes it pretty useless as a back-up device. You have to be around to turn it back on.
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