Home > Consumer Reviews > Belkin F6H500-USB UPS with Shutdown Software (8 Outlets, 500VA)

Had two of these at work crap out and die within a year of each other. All our UPS units are Belkin and we've had issues, greater or smaller, with all of them. These F6H500s in particular died with no warning, under no undue circumstances (lightning strike, etc) and when that happened there was absolutely nothing I could do with them. There was no self-test, no blinking lights. Dead. They became expensive 12-pound bricks.

I bought 12 (yes 12) of these to protect all my computers. The fact is that they all work really great if your gonna skip the software (although the software is what properly shuts the computer down before the battery dies). On every single one of them, the software will lose connection with the UPS after a few days rendering the software useless. The only way to fix this is to shut everything down, turn the ups off, unplug the ups for a minute, plug it back in and boot everything up again. This will give you a few more days. Being that I never shut my computers down, this sucks royally. It happens to ALL 12 on different machines so that confirms a design flaw in this unit. I look for a bios update to possibly fix the problem often, but no luck on belkins site. BUYERS BEWARE!!!!

If you care about USB (rather than serial) and you care about it 'just working' with your windows XP, then buy something else.

I got sent the one with a serial cable, and some terribly poor software.

I used windows XP's UPS control panel (power management) and I think I had to say it was an APC serial device.

No idea if it's doing the right thing - my confidence is low with this product.

However, if you don't mind serial, and running other s/ware - it's probably OK.

If you care about USB and XP compatibility, don't buy this.

Otherwise, go for it.