Last night around 6:00 we had a small power outage in our building.  This is the first time that we’ve lost power at all since the building was under construction, and it lasted for less than a second.  I wasn’t worried at all about our servers or phone system because everything network-related (servers, switches, both firewalls, cable modem, etc) is on a UPS.  I knew our desktops would receive a hard reboot, but just this once… shouldn’t hurt them, right?

Well, I came in this morning to find that 3 of those desktops weren’t doing too well.  All 3 of them were EXTREMELY sluggish once their respective users logged in.  I took a look at the processes running, and saw that svchost.exe was using +90% of the CPU.  Very odd.  I let the machines sit for a bit, and much to my relief they calmed down after awhile.  The event logs haven’t turned up anything definite

After looking through MS’s support site, I’ve got an few things to check out, although I do have reservations about trying to replicate the incident.  Was this incident related to the power loss?  It would seem so, given the order of events.  Intentionally cutting power on PCs is not my cup o’ tea though…perhaps we’ll try it on one of the cold spares. :-)  If the incident WAS power-related, it really raises the case for setting a “UPS for every PC (or Mac)” policy.  Under the right circumstances, dirty power could bring about a support nightmare for me and K.  I’ve been hoping to avoid the UPS issue until next year, as we’re trying to run lean in 2007.  Hopefully it can stay that way until 2008.