Tom -- With the APC model, when power comes back on, do you need to do anything? The description for a similar model says that "once the event is over, simply reset the breakers on the unit and get back to work." but I might not be around when the power goes out for a few seconds. Would I be screwed if I don't reset it in time?

No, you don't need to do anything once the power goes back on. A little popup near the system tray will tell you you're on battery power and then it'll tell you when your AC power comes back on, but that's it.

Huh. So what's that "reset the breakers" business about, then?

When I was putting my laptop into standby in xp was that the equivalent of sleep or hibernate in Windows 7?

I'm going to guess sleep. How long did it take it to come back to full working order?

Sleep leaves the memory powered, so the whole computer continues to drain power, though obviously way less than when it's on. Hibernate copies the RAM to your hard disk and shuts down, then when you start it back up copies the data back to RAM and resumes operation where it left off. It therefore uses no power, but at the cost of taking significantly longer to return to a working state. The Mac has similar settings (when I use my laptop all the way to battery death or sleep it long enough for the battery to drain, it hibernates automatically).

The one thing that annoys me about mu current cheapy APC backup is that when there is a power problem it beeps until the power is normal. Hey UPC I noticed the lights are flickering. If power stays bad very long I will shut down. Don't need your nagging. Do more modern ones not do this?

Well, I just hibernated for the first time, and that answered that question. It made me put in my BIOS password on starting back up. But sleep seemed to use more batteries than XP's standby. I wonder if I can sleep for a weekend like before.

I want to love my Win 7 upgrade, but my key goal is never turning the computer off. I want to avoid that extra password level, plus the time involved.

Ours beep loudly when the power goes off, but just for a second or two.

But you know, it's possible to have a brown-out, where your lights still work but there's not enough power to run your computer so it crashes.

In my old office, the lights were on a different circuit than my computer. So someone could trip the breaker on the circuit that powered my computer without the lights going out.

Word question (I have 2010):

I need to add a sample passage -- think standardized test reading comprehension passage. It's supposed to look like it will on the real exam.

It's in two columns of text, and in the left margin to the side of each column are line numbers for each line, so people can use line numbers to answer certain questions.

The link to the sample test format I'm looking at is here, [link]

Except I think that might just take you to the whole guide. It's Reading Comprehension under Sample Test Items in the sidebar.

I cannot figure out how to format it.