# APC Battery backup: PowerChute vs. XP's Power Management?



## Fanny Farmer (Sep 8, 2010)

I've installed APC's "Powerchute Personal Edition" for an APC XS1300 on a business network server. It has a lot of problems right of the bat and I already hate it. Noticed today that XP has power management options, such as when to go into hibernate, when to shut down, alarms, etc... It seems to have a lot more features than this APC Powerchute.

First thing Powerchute does is misreport how much time until the battery runs down. Even with 100% charge and a @75 watt load, it says there is less than 2 minutes of battery left. (In fact the battery will run for over 30 minutes.) The whole purpose of the battery is to keep the Server (and network access) running during power outages, and there is no point in even having the battery if Powerchute is going to turn off the computer 20 seconds after power is interupted. There is no way to adjust this in the software.

The reason why this is a major problem is that the software sends the computer into shutdown immediately after power interuption, even though it could run for 30 minutes (or more, I'm still testing it).

Is there a way to tweak this software into functionality or can I uninstall it and rely on XP's Power Management?

Thanks in advance.


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## JimE (Apr 16, 2009)

The XP features are geared toward power savings, especially in regards to laptops (batteries). The PowerChute software will monitor battery life and shutdown the PC when the battery is low. There may be some redundancy in power options in the PowerChute software, but it's purpose is to shutdown the PC.


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## Jonny Robot (Sep 8, 2010)

So today while explaining to my customer that I think the "brains" of the brand-new APC XS1300 may be messed-up, it occured to me that the computer it's attached to may be the problem. Both the test set-up I have at home and the Network Server have been optimized (by me) and a component of that optimization is turning off unnecessary services.

So, I went to Control Panel>Administrative Tools>Services and tried to turn on the Uninteruptible Power Supply Service which results in the error message:


> Services: Could not start the Uninteruptible Power Supply Service on Local Computer. Error 2481: The UPS Serivice is not configured correctly.


The UPS Service is not dependent on anything, nor is anything dependent on it. The only other thing I can think of is that Powerchute has "done something".

Anyone have any ideas ?


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## JimE (Apr 16, 2009)

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/186541


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## Fanny Farmer (Sep 8, 2010)

Thanks Dogg. I actually did google the error message and I read that article. Went to the configuration settings described in the article and found my UPS, but the Window would not let me "Apply" the changes. I figured either XP could not see/recognize the device, or there was a Service (or something) not running.

But the UPS Service is standalone. It has no dependencies, nor is it dependent on something else, and when I try to manually start the service I get a message that the "Service is not properly configured", or words to that effect.

Any ideas ?


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## JimE (Apr 16, 2009)

The error is normal. As stated in the article, you cannot start the service without configuring it first.


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## Jonny Robot (Sep 8, 2010)

Dogg said:


> The error is normal. As stated in the article, you cannot start the service without configuring it first.





Fanny Farmer said:


> Went to the configuration settings described in the article and found my UPS, but the Window would not let me "Apply" the changes. I figured either XP could not see/recognize the device, or there was a Service (or something) not running.


There is no option provided to save the configuration settings. I have a question pending on the APC forums. They gave me directions on how to calibrate the battery. I'm not confident that this is going to fix it as I have already "deep cycled" the batter numerous times and the output is still puny and the amount of power reported is completely wrong. The only thing the directions advise that is different than what I did is they say to drain the battery at 35% of total load or greater, and not let the drain fluctuate more than 5%. I'm very skeptical.


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