How to Check Your Battery on a MaC

Check the Health of Your Battery

With the Time you have probably noticed that your battery does not hold the charge as well as when is was new.
The more you use it, the less it holds. So, when do you need to replace it? Can you tell in advance when it will fail?

2 simple apps to your rescue:

- The simple but very efficient Coconut Battery & the more complete iStat Pro. Good news: Both are free (Free, but a 'lil donation is encouraged *)

Coconut Battery


Coconut Battery is dedicated to your battery,
Very simple app to use and it tells you just what you need to know:
Charge, Health, Number of cycles and the original charge.
It also tell you the age of your Mac, just in case you want to have a B-Day party. :-)



Download Coconut here



You can also save the values, if you wish to track your battery health.
To Save, click on the gray arrow. I know.. hard to find ...


You can also check the others Coconut Soft while you're at it ...

iStat Pro

iStat pro is a complete monitoring system for your Mac, Disks, Networks, WIFI, CPU, Memory, Fans Speed, Processes, etc.
With Drag & Drop, you'll configure it the way you want





Download iStat Pro
(Free, but a 'lil donation is encouraged *)


Tips to extend the life of your battery
Batteries have a "memory" and it's not good....
The shorter are your charge cycles, The shorter your battery life will be.
So, Drain the battery to the lowest possible each time, and charge to the max each time, when possible, Avoid plugging -unplugging repeatedly, a 5 min charge does very little good.
To extend the duration of a charge, set your battery management parameters to "Energy Saver" , Turn Airport Off when you don't need it, and reduce the luminosity of your screen.

Glossary

Loadcycles or Cycles
The number of times where you battery entered a charge (full charge). The lower the number, the better.
mAh
milli Ampere per Hour,
The higher the number, the more powerful your battery is (capacity) I.e 6300 mAh allows 6.3 hours at 1000 mA drawing or 3.15 hours at 2000 mA.
Under very intensive use, a MacBook Pro 17" can use up to

*Donations:
You pay $48 for a gallon of Coffee at Star-Bucks, you can probably spare $3 for something that will do something good for your Mac ...