🔌 Is a UPS worth buying for a desktop with frequent power cuts?

We get power cuts in our area almost every day now, sometimes 3 in a single afternoon. Each time my desktop just goes black. No warning, no shutdown. The fans stop in the middle of a sentence. I keep thinking one day the hard disk won't come back on. Last month Windows took 20 minutes to repair itself. My brother says I'm worrying too much, but he doesn't use my computer. I'm not doing anything heavy on it. It's office work, browsing, some YouTube and light gaming at night. So I'm trying to understand if a UPS is worth it for a normal home PC. I don't need it to run for hours. A few minutes to save my file and shut down properly is enough. What capacity do I even look for? The numbers on the box mean nothing to me. The shop near my house told me to buy a big one for 8000 rupees. That seems like a lot. But I also don't want to buy the cheapest one and have it fail on the day I need it. I once bought a cheap extension board that smelled like burning plastic after 2 weeks, so I'm careful now. Please tell me what brands you trust, and which ones to stay away from. Does a UPS also help when the voltage goes up and down? Our lights flicker before most cuts. And how long does the battery last before it needs to be replaced? Someone told me 2 or 3 years. I'd like to hear from people with a similar home setup, not shop owners. I'll buy one this week if I get a couple of replies.

Please don't plug a laser printer or a heater into the UPS, it'll trip right away. For a PC and a monitor, a basic one is enough, and mine has been fine through lots of cuts. Our lights flicker before a cut too, and the UPS handled that without the PC even blinking. Check the shop bill for a warranty, since the battery is the part that usually fails first.

We had the same daily cuts in our colony and I bought a small UPS 4 years ago for my desktop. The best part isn't the backup time, it's that it beeps and I get a few minutes to save my work. Skip the 8000 rupee one if you only do office work. A small one is enough. Change the battery when the backup time drops under a minute, mine needed that after 3 years.

Went with a 600VA UPS for my own setup two years ago after a power cut fried a friend's hard disk, and it has been more than enough for just office use and light browsing. Do not need a huge capacity unless you are running something demanding, the goal is really just a clean few minutes to shut down safely rather than staying powered through the whole outage.