The Tech Bench

Calibrate every few months for the best performance.

Did you know that you can calibrate your Mac laptop’s battery to boost performance and prolong its life?

There is an internal microprocessor (that can be calibrated) in the battery that provides an estimate on the amount of energy left in the battery. This calibration helps to keep the onscreen battery time and percentage display accurate. This in turn helps the computer properly charge the battery reducing the overall amount of cycle counts on the battery.

Apple recommends calibrating the battery when you first use the computer and then every few months.

For MacBook, MacBook Pro, MacBook Air and PowerBook G4 (15″ 1.67 DL SD only)

1. Plug in the power adapter and let the book fully charge (green light will appear on the power adapter.)

2. Keep the power adapter connected for at least 2 hours (to charge the PRAM battery) You can use the machine during this time.

3. With the machine on, unplug the power adapter and let the computer run until the battery fully drains and the laptop goes to sleep. Leave the machine in sleep mode (or off) for at least 5 hours.

4. Connect the power adapter and let the battery fully charge (until the power adapter light turns green.) That’s it.

For iBook and PowerBook G4 (All models except 15″ 1.67 DL SD)

Fully charge the battery (green light on power adapter.) Unplug the power adapter and run the laptop until the battery drains  (it powers off or goes to sleep.) Connect the power adapter and let the battery fully charge. That’s it.

Hello, Drobo.

Backup is something you can never have too much of. Hard drives will eventually fail, so it’s a good idea to have a 2nd or 3rd line of defense against losing your data.

Time Machine This software built in to Leopard is easy to setup and even easier to user. Hookup any external hard disk drive to you Mac and you will automatically be asked if you’d like to user it as a backup drive. Time machine will make backups every hour until the external drive is full, after that the older backups are removed. There aren’t too many options provided in Time Machine (can’t backup to multiple drives or schedule backup times), but it’s free and a good place to start.

Retrospect This application has been around forever, and was just recently updated to include some better features. More robust than Time Machine, you can backup multiple machines in a house, schedule backups times, backup only certain data etc. etc.

Online/Offsite Check out services such as MozyPro or Backjack (I use both, call me a little paranoid). This encrypts your data and sends it over the internet to one server (sometimes more for redundancy). Good to have in case of a fire or other natural disaster. This isn’t necessarily great if you have hundreds of gigabytes of data, since it has to pass over your internet connection. You can setup most offline services to backup at night, thereby not interrupting your bandwidth during the day when you are working, or use a throttling feature to send out small amounts of data. I prefer MozyPro out of the two services. It has block level backup, which means for large, multi gigabyte files, it only backups up the part of the file that has been changed, not the entire file every time it changes. Saves bandwidth, and saves headache.

RAID When backing up to an external hard drive, I recommend using some type of RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) system. It’s a box containing multiple hard drives that appear as one. The basic idea is if one of the drives fails, the data is also on one or more of the other hard drives, so you can just swap out the offending drive and you’re good to go. A great home solution is the Drobo. Easy to use, easy to setup, and if you’re connecting it via FireWire 800 to your Mac, extremely fast.

There’s multiple other solutions out there, for brevity’s sake I’ve just laid out a few to get you started. Got questions? Drop a comment below.

[ Time Machine ]

[ BackJack ]

[ Mozy ]

[ Drobo ]