A health check for your Mac's battery

My MacBook’s battery took a turn for the worse last week. Luckily Apple has already sent me a new one (even though I only had 26 days left on my warranty – Apple customer service FTW).

While I waited for the new battery to arrive I played around with coconutBattery, a free download from coconut-flavour.com, which showed me the health of my battery (it weirdly fluctuated throughout the day from 96% to 54%), how much charge I had left and the number of full charge cycles it had been through.

Of course the latter two snippets of info can be found from the ‘About this Mac’ facility, but coconutBattery does more and all in one place. It tells you the original maximum capacity of your battery  on day one, lets you save information about the maximum capacity of the battery at any given time and even how long you’ve owned your beloved Mac.

It will also tell you if your battery is currently charging and apparently even warns you if you’ve plugged in the wrong charger. Although how that could happen is a little beyond me.

coconutBattery can be downloaded for free from http://www.coconut-flavour.com/coconutbattery.

Sometimes I open the applications folder on my OS X dock and wish that there were more programs listed. I know this is pretty stupid and I have no basis for feeling this way. It’s not like I have any need for more software. I don’t even use all of the software that I have. Anyway, today’s blog is about some of the software I use on a daily basis. In addition to the software mentioned, I use many products that are included with Mac OS X Leopard like iChat, Apple Mail, Address Book, iCal, and iTunes. All of the software mentioned below has to be purchased or downloaded for free.

I’ve been using the program ecto to update my blog for a few months now and I just love it. My friend Henry suggested it to me and it was a great suggestion. Henry is also my friend that came up with the name for my blog. So, go Henry! ecto allows me to write and tag blog posts, upload them to my blog, and download ones I might have written on wordpress.com. I have never had a problem with it. ecto costs $19.95.

A few weeks ago I started to read up on the proper way to treat your laptop battery, specifically for MacBooks. It’s kinda ridiculous how each person or blog has a different suggestion or practice. Some people swear by letting their battery run down every time they use their laptop and others keep them always plugged in. Personally, I always use my laptop on the battery, unless I am charging it. This is what Apple suggests that you do and I found that after 10 months of owning this computer my battery still has 97% battery life. I think I read somewhere that my favorite tech columnist David Pogue suggested it too. The weird thing about that is how Apple says a normal battery will last at least 500 cycles. When you let your battery run down every time you use it, you are using up more and more cycles. So I am not far off from 500 cycles, in under 1 year of use. This seems kinda lame! I am not too worried though because I treat my battery correctly, but that seems like a reason why someone would use their laptop while keeping it plugged in.

I recently downloaded this program called coconutBattery, that lets you know how many cycles your battery has gone through, what your original battery capacity was, and what your current battery capacity is. It also tells you how old your laptop is, if for some reason you can’t remember that on your own. I found this to be really helpful when I was trying to figure out what percentage of my battery was still usable. After opening coconutBattery again, it says my battery has only 95% capacity, but that is still really good for being almost 1 year old. You should definitely check out coconutBattery if you use a MacBook or MacBook Pro. coconutBattery is free.

When I originally got my MacBook I was very much into using iWork 08, which has the programs Pages (for word processing), Numbers (for spreadsheets), and Keynote (for presentations). I wasn’t using it that often because I was not in school or needing to write in a word processor. I am no fan of Microsoft, but I have to admit that using Microsoft Office for Mac 2008 has become my program of choice lately. The basic version has Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Entourage. For those that have PCs, Entourage is the Mac version of Outlook. I do all of my school work in Microsoft Word and I use Entourage for my gmail and school email accounts. It might just be the fonts that Microsoft has added to my system or the fact that I don’t have to export my papers into .doc files because they automatically save that way, but I don’t really know why I like using Office better. I guess I am pretty lazy. I do have iWork 09 now, but don’t use it much. I do like the resume templates that Pages comes with though. Microsoft Office for Mac 2008 comes in three different versions for $149.95, $399.95, or $499.95. iWork 09 is $79.00.

I don’t know if anyone else uses Picasa to share their pictures on the Internet, but Picasa 3 beta for Mac is an amazing program. Picasa is Google’s picture sharing website. You can create albums from pictures on your hard drive, decide how public you want them to be, decide the maximum size you want the pictures so they don’t take up too much space online, and upload them to your Picasa account without opening up your web browser. Picasa 3 beta is free.

Most importantly, I use Tweetie for Mac to update and read my Twitter feed. Most of my friends on Twitter know that I am on it way too often. This program is super simple and navigates extremely easily. There are 4 views which include the feed with all of the feeds that you follow, a feed with every “tweet” that mentions you, your direct messages (DMs), and a search page. My favorite feature is that it doesn’t auto-scroll to the top of your feed when it opens. It goes back to the place you left off reading when you last had the program open. My one issue is that this feature only works 2/3rds of the time. The other 1/3rd of the time I have to figure out where I left off by myself. This is not a good choice if you want to put the people you follow on twitter into groups. Ad supported Tweetie for Mac is free. The registered version of Tweetie for Mac is $19.95.

I recently wrote about extending your MacBook’s battery life via a firmware update. Today I am going to outline how to extend your battery life by calibrating it so that it holds its charge properly. After all, running out of juice with when you’re on the go is the worst possible scenario in the electronic world!

As a general rule, you should calibrate your battery every month or two to keep it running in top form.

To calibrate your laptop’s battery:

1. Plug your laptop in and let it charge completely (your battery icon in the menu bar will be completely full and the charger’s connector light turns green).
2. Keep the laptop plugged in for another two hours (after it is fully charged).
3. Disconnect your laptop from power. Use it until it falls asleep from low battery.
4. Turn off the laptop and let it “rest” for about five hours.
5. Plug your laptop back in and let it fully charge.

It is completely fine to use your laptop during all of these steps (except, of course, when the computer is asleep).

Calibrating your laptop battery every few months is a great way to ensure you get the longest life out of it. If you’ve had your laptop for a little while and want to know the current maximum capacity of your battery, you can use the free coconutBattery utility.

coconutBattery isn’t just a tool which shows you only the current charge of your battery – it also shows you the current maximum capacity of it in relation to the original capacity your battery had as it left the factory. You also get information about the battery-loadcycles (how often did you fully load your battery), the current charger (coconutBattery even warns you if you plugged in a wrong charger for your Notebook) and last but not least information about the age of your Mac.

Schon vor längerer Zeit bin ich einmal über die Coconut-Applikationen gestolpert. Zugegeben, ich benutze sie recht selten bis gar nicht.

Durch einen Blogeintrag bin ich neugierig geworden was in meinem Akku noch so drinsteckt. Hierzu benutzt man coconutBattery.

Vor allem überrascht bin ich über die zusätzlichen Informationen. Jetzt habe ich das kleine weiße Ding schon 27 Monate. Wie die Zeit vergeht…

Demnächst wird es ein Update für coconutBattery geben, dass dann mehrsprachig ist. Bereits die momentan aktuelle Version 2.6.3 ist unter der Haube fast komplett neu geschrieben worden.

coconutBattery is a tool that reads out the data of your notebook-battery (iBook/Powerbook). It gives you live feedback, what’s going on in your battery (not only a snapshot like other tools).It shows the current charge of your battery as well as the current maximum capacity related to its original.

Finally coconutBattery calculates the age of your Mac exactly! So you can derive the age of your battery. And last but not least: coconutBattery is Universal Binary (you can run it on Intel-Macs!) and it is complete localizable!
Download

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=7E2ZDMMV

CoconutBattery – paprasta programėlė greitam baterijos talpos patikrinimui.

Reikalavimai: Mac OS 10.4.5 ar naujesnė

Iš kur parsisiųsti: http://www.coconut-flavour.com/coconutbattery/ (nemokama)

Honestly I couldn’t get it why it can be done by software update. I don’t know if it has kind of firmware built-in the battery. Or I guess Apple had bug of the battery capacity calculation before. But anyway, I tried the Battary Update 1.3 for MacBook Pro 15 inch models. I found now my battery has even higher capacity then it was new!

And there’s a very nice freeware called coconutBattery, it keeps track of your battery’s max capacity. A great indicator of when you have to replace your battery and it also talks you the cruel fact, your battery capacity is getting smaller and smaller by time…

I got the gain from 5281mAh to 5606mAh after the update! It’s even higher than 5575mAh first recorded!!!