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 ...

I feel safe now

From @ComputerGoddess



Yup!
I was also told that OS X is immune to both H5N1 Swine Flu & Bird Flu, hence you can SAFELY take your Macbook out in the wild without risking a contamination.

Glad we have expert watching the internet .... (Sigh!)




.

Time Machine

The Gem of OS X

If I had to praise OS X for only one thing, it would be for Time Machine.
Time Machine is a MUST for any user.
If not set up yet on your Mac , run baby run! Do it NOW! Drop everything you are doing now, and do it!

Setting up Time Machine is as simple as “ON / OFF” and it will save your life.
Go to Applications , look for Time Machine and Click “ON”
Now you can Relax…
Not Only you have a backup, but the backup of the backup, and the backup of the backup of the .. you got the message….

You just need an external hard drive, or better, if you want to splurge: a Time Capsule. Here again: Hail to Apple!
Time Capsule is a WIFI Router, dual band please, with a HDD integrated. Yes, it does your backups wirelessly every hour, and It also work with multiple stations.
For $299, you have a 1terabytes (1000Mb) backup disk and an Airport Extreme, Dual band with all the gizmos you need, including a guest account (yes, they’re guest, but it does not mean that I'll give them MY password)
Ah , also , you can have up to 50 connection at any time (just in case you run an Apple Store at home)

Do I sound like an Apple Sales Rep? At your first issue, you’ll understand…
Getting your stuff back is priceless; doing it without any fuss is bliss.

The cons of the Time Capsule are that you can not (unless you perform a deep surgery) create a partition on Time Capsule and, in the event of a repair, you’ll have to do without your airport for the time being.

The Pros are countless, just try it, at your first use of Time Machine you'll fall in love.

How to Set Time Machine Backup Interval

If you feel that one backup every hour is too much, or not enough, here is how to set the time between each backup:

FYI:
If you don't know what you are doing, don't do it.
this is "At your own risk"

Default setting: 3600 (seconds)

1) Look for a file named com.apple.backupd-auto.plist
this file is in /System/Library/LaunchDaemons
Or use Spotlight to find it for you

2) open this file with your text editor
3) BEFORE you edit the file, make a copy, just in case ...
4) look for the following:

(CTRL-F makes it easier)

5) Change 3600 in the number you want i.e. 1800 for 30 min
5400=90 min 7200=120 min etc ...

6) Save file, et voila!

Just be aware: The greater is the interval, the larger (and longer) the backup will be. >> 99999 is not a good idea...