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!!!!

OK, so I have the previous 450 VA model, but it just failed on me causing a power outage. The battery failed, and power just went out. The next day, the battery bad indicator starting beeping but TOO LATE. For an uninterruptible power supply to cause a power outage is just unacceptable.

Everything I have gotten from Belkin has been poorly designed. I replaced with an APC. They seem to have a clue.

This is the third Belkin SERIAL UPS I have purchased. (...)You need to set up the Software and do some tweaking to your liking, and they work like a charm.
Now, I just purchased this unit and it works great just as expected on a fully loaded machine.
I also have some APC UPS units- I'll take the Belkins any day over them.
Just FOLLOW DIRECTIONS, set up your Software, and listen to that sexy sounding lady with the English accent tell you the status of your UPS while it's safely shutting down your Computer...Now that's living! :-)

I have two of these and they both work fine for my needs. One is plugged into Tivo and the DirectTV box because they take so friggin long to boot up after an outage, and the other is connected to my Sun Fire V120 server. Admittedly, this isn't a high-end server, and I had to splice together an RJ-45 to Cat-5 serial cable to install the Unix daemon (available on their website), but it serves my needs perfectly. None of the bricks have ever run out of power, so the battery life is certainly adequate for an average computer.

If the lack of a USB cable is a problem for some, perhaps they don't understand that serial connections are older and therefore much more reliable than USB connections. USB is adequate for MP3 players, but it is too unreliable for a utility that's meant to protect your system from damage.