Well, I was thinking of a laptop for the main PC

When the desktop went south again. I was thinking it's as powerful as a tower and if we wanted, we can always unplug everything for portability.

What I wasn't really thinking about was that the laptop is protected from voltage surges through it's charger.
That tower made it through this summers rolling black-outs with no problem and the few outages we've had since.

Until that voltage spike we just had.

Then I had a gray screen of death with a pink line on top.
After I tried rebooting, we have the blue screen of death.

And I still have to see how much we owe that tax cheat- Tim Geithner.

Nevermind.
I powered everything down for five minutes and we're good to go.