I happened to buy a UPS from ALCOM. It came with neither a warranty

card, nor an instruction manual. I connected it to my computer in

the belief that

comp. An hour later there was a power cut, and along with it my pc

made a restart. I was shocked. The worst thing was that the UPS

was making a whirring noise. I immidiately called the shop -

Netsys at Sector 14 Gurgaon and told him of the problem. He sent

me a replacement the very next morning.

            Convinced that the earlier one was a rare faulty piece, I

started using the second UPS. I was playing a game on my pc, when

the power cut came. Again my pc took a restart. Flustered at this,

I called up the shop again and he suggested that I call up Mr. Rajat

at Alcom. When I told him of the problem, he asked me to call up

his office, since he was on leave. I did so and the next day they

sent a technician to look at the problem. He cam when my wife was

at home and after making some repairs, convinced her that the

fault was rectified. I came in the evening to discover that the

problem was now a different one, the pc would restart when the

power came back after the power cut. I called up the technician

and he said he’d come and repair it the next day. He came again

and convinced my wife that the prob was solved. But it was not.

            When I complained again, it was replaced a couple of days

later. The same prob existed. Another technician came and declared

this third one to be faulty. Another replacement came. This

continued for about 5 replacements. Either the UPS would cut

output when the power went off or it would do so when it came

back. One of the UPSs actually worked well for 10 days, and I was

happy but on the seventh day, it failed. This was replaced too.

Once the technician exclaimed - "We have informed of this problem

to the people at the factory, but what can we do if they don’t

correct the design. After the sixth replacement, I went to the

shop Netsys, to get a different brand in place of Alcom and told

them of the problems I had been facing for the past 4 weeks. The

person there was shocked, told me, "you should have informed us

immediately, I thought your problem had been resolved". Then he

called up Rajat, who was the director of Alcom and told him of the

problem I was facing. When I talked to Rajat, he started saying

that there was definitely some breakage in the neutral supply in

my house, that’s why this was happening. He started feeding me

some crap - if there is a break in your neutral, then there is no

return path and so there will be no supply. He had no answer to

the fact how the pc was normally running and how other brands of

UPS like Microtek from my friend, had no probs. Finally he said

he’d get the problem closed the very day.

            One of the technicians - Anup, came again and didn’t even

look at the problem, since he’d seen it too many times. He

suggested that I get my SMPS checked, since playing games on a

computer weakens some capacitor in the SMPS. This was the second

joke I had heard, after the "break in the neutral" theory from

Rajat. So to humor him, I got a technician from Netsys who came

with a brand new Intex SMPS. After fitting the new SMPS, the

problem with the UPS persisted. The guy at netsys informed Anup

about the failure of his theory.

            The next day I was sent another replacement. The seventh

in 5 weeks. This looked a little sleek and trendy. It was supposed

to have a new mother board design. After the pc booted up on this

I switched off the supply to the UPS. This time the pc did not

even reboot, the ups with new design, refused to give any output

power at all. And this was supposed to have been well checked

before delivery.

            I had learnt my lesson well. Alcom sells crude looking

heavy metal boxes under the name of UPS. I went to netsys and got

a Microtek UPS after returning the Alcom metal box. There’s never

been a problem since.

So friends, don’t ever buy an Alcom UPS, at least not the offline

ones for home PCs. If Seven of them don’t work at all, there’s

some serious design issue or else, they use low grade components