Tech Tip: Maximizing your battery life.
One question that we hear a lot is from new laptop owners about keeping their battery running at it’s highest capacity for the longest time. Battery maintenance is a necessary albeit annoying aspect of owning a portable so here are a few easy tips to keep your battery healthy.
1. Train your battery. When you buy a new portable device training your battery is an important first step. When you get home, charge your device to 100% capacity, unplug the device, and let it discharge completely. Repeat this procedure twice to train your battery. NOTE: You may use the device while you perform this process.
2. Keep your laptop in it’s ‘comfort zone’. Temperature is an important aspect to keep in mind. Keeping your laptop too hot or too cold can decrease your battery’s lifespan. Never keep your laptop in a hot car, leave it running under a blanket, or in direct sunlight for long periods of time. If you like to use your laptop in bed use a large hardcover book or a commercial laptop ‘lap shelf’ from our store instead of keeping it directly on your lap.
Courtesy of Apple®
3. Keep your battery fit. Do not leave your laptop plugged in all the time or completely discharged for long periods of time. If you go away for a week try and keep your battery at around 50% to ensure that it does not go into a ‘deep discharged state’ and is unable to be charged again. Alternatively, do not keep your laptop plugged in all the time or you may experience a loss in capacity. Try to fully discharge and recharge your laptop at least once a month as per the instructions in step one.
4. Optimize your energy preferences. The brightness of your display has a very large impact on your battery life. If you’re watching a DVD or doing any other tasks that tend to drain your battery quickly then dimming the display is an easy way to get more time. Finally, turning off your Airport and Bluetooth can give you a surprising amount of extra juice.
Turn down your brightness in the 'Display's' preferences in System Preferences
For more information see: Apple.com/Batteries
Free Content Filtering with OpenDNS
Getting content filtering for your home or small business can be daunting, pricey, and difficult to set up. Luckily a company called OpenDNS has done all the work for you and is offering it for FREE. Signing up and getting started with OpenDNS is easy, just follow the instructions on their website or the following below (tailored for Mac users – of course).
- Change DNS settings! This is the most important step. On an Apple Airport open up your Airport Uitlity located in the ‘Utilities’ folder within the ‘Applications’ folder. Make sure your Airport device shows up in the left hand column and click it once. Continue by clicking on the ‘Manual Setup’ button. On the very top of the window there should now be an ‘Internet’ category, click it once and fill in these two DNS servers in the appropriate fields. DNS Server 1: 208.67.222.222 DNS server 2: 208.67.220.220
- Sign up for your free account here (https://www.opendns.com/smb/start/create_account/).
- Configure your account! First add a network by putting your in your ip address. You can find your IP address by simply pointing your browser to whatismyip.com. After that you are free to mess around with whatever settings you want to play with. Don’t be afraid to experiment.
Macworld 2009
Hope everyone got a chance to catch all the updates from Macworld 2009 but if not here is a complete list of the list of new products.
iLife ’09
- iPhoto ’09 – “Organize photos two new ways: Faces, based on who’s in your photos, and Places, based on where your photos were taken. Then share on Facebook or Flickr with a click.” New facial recognition feature allows you to sort by the most important things in the photo.
- iMovie ’09 – “Make a great movie in the time you have. Choose a dynamic theme to enhance your movie in seconds. Or refine every shot with the Precision Editor.”
- Garageband ’09 – “Learn to play piano and guitar. Learn songs from the artists who made them famous. Rock like a legend with new guitar amps and stompbox effects.” Includes a new store which allows you to download music lessons for a small fee on the instrument of your choice.
- iWeb ’09 – “Design a website to share your photos, movies, and music just by dragging and dropping. Add new dynamic widgets and publish and share with a click.”
iWork ’09
- Pages ’09 – “With advanced tools for writing and easy page layout, your documents in Pages are beautiful beyond words.” There is a new feature with all of iWork which allows you to share documents online and make notes on them.
- Numbers ’09 – “Numbers helps you get more from your data with easy-to-create formulas, one-click charts, and table categories.”
- Keynote ’09 – “New cinematic animations, transitions, and effects in Keynote will keep your audience captivated.”
New 17″ MacBook Pro with the new graphics chips, unibody enclosure, LED display, and extended battery (giving you around eight hours of battery life).
New iTunes pricing levels will be 0.69, 0.99, and 1.29. For an extra fee you will be able to download ANY song DRM free so you can do what you want with your music.
Tech Tip – Mail Bug in 10.4 – 10.5 Migration
There is an interesting bug with mail I found that happens occaisionally in a 10.4 (Tiger) to 10.5 (Leopard) migration. This bug will make mail unable to quit and all your messages will not appear in the mail window. To fix this issue:
1. Navigate to your Library folder inside your home folder.
2. Locate the Mail folder and drag it to your desktop.
3. Launch the Mail application.
4. Mail will now ask you if you want import your messages. DO NOT HIT CONTINUE YET.
5. Navigate back to your Library folder inside your home folder. Notice there is a NEW mail folder that was created. You cannot delete this folder yet because it is in use by mail so we will just rename this folder Mail2.
6. Drag your OLD mail folder located on your desktop to your Library folder located in your home folder.
7. Go back to the Mail application and click continue. Your messages and settings should import fine now.
8. Verify that your messages and settings imported correctly and quit Mail. Navigate back to your home Library folder located in your home folder and delete the Mail2 folder.
9. Launch the Mail application and make sure everything functions correctly.
I found a fix to this by just messing around with the issue for awhile. I have found NO good resolutions online for this bug. Another solution is to just delete the mail preference file but then all your settings will be lost and your mail will have to be imported (this will put a new folder in the mail app called imported messages, I find this to be a work around not a fix). In any case, this tip is a perfect solution to this bug.
MacMechanic Free Seminar Cancelation/Holiday Schedule
The Santa Barbara Mac Users Group seminars sponsored by MacMechanic will be cancelled next week on the 24th and the following week on the 30th for the holidays. Please update your calendars, the online calendar will also reflect this change. In addition we will be closed on Christmas day and New Years day.
All the MacMechanic Technicians are now Certified!
All the MacMechanic technicians are now certified!
We are proud to announce that our final technician has completed his Apple Certified Macintosh Technician certification. The website has been updated to reflect all of our technical employees current certification status. Thank you to all our customers who helped us get to where we are, you can count on us to continue to step up our game.
Feel free to take another look at our On-Sites page, it has been updated as well.
“You can rest assured that your machine will be handled in a professional manner, as MacMechanic staffs only Apple Certified Technicians.”
Tech Tip 11/28/08.2
Troubleshooting Software Issues Part 2: Migrating User Data
From our internal wiki:
1: Perform an Archive and Install without saving User setting.
2: Create new user with the same User name/Short name and password as the old user. Navigate to the /Previous Systems/Users/users folder, and locate the old users data. Copy old users directory to the new desktop folder.
3: Copy the contents of the old Desktop folder to the new Desktop folder. Same for the: Documents, Downloads, Movie, Music and Pictures folders. Saving the Library folder for last.
4: In the old Library folder keep the following directories if they are present:
* Address Book Plug-ins
* Application Enhancers
* Application Support
* Calendars
* Internet Plug-ins
* iTunes
* Keychains
* Mail
* Mail Downloads
* PreferencePanes
* Preferences
* Printers
* Safari
* Screen Savers
* StickiesDatabase
* Widgets
“This list is by no means complete, other Third-Party software will create folders in the ~/Library. Do some investigating before you trash unidentified folders.”
Once you have these folder separated, follow the same tactic as before, replacing the contents of the new Safari with the contents of old Safari folder: etc.
Start from the top of the list and work your way down, restarting the Mac after each folder move. The Preferences folder should be treated like it is its own animal. Replacing each .plist and then restarting the Mac.
Tech Tip 11/13/08.1
Troubleshooting Software Issues Part 1: Users
Software problems can be a pain to diagnose but they are often easy problems to fix at home. If I have determined that a particular problem is software but I am unable to isolate the issue right away, the first thing I do is create a test user. Creating a test user helps to determine whether the problem is related to anything inside the problem system’s user account. For instance, if there is a corrupted preference file that is causing a program to crash when launched, you will notice that the problem is not reproduced in the new user. In this case you could just go ahead and delete the preference file, however you will find that some user-related problems can not be solved that easily.
Test User
Once you have successfully isolated the problem with a test user, how do you fix the original problem? Read part two to find out.
Tech Tip November 3rd
Mount Computer Shares on Startup
The ability to share files between computers is a easy and convenient feature to set up. You can connect to another machine by selecting the go menu and then connect to server, but what if you want to be connected to a machine all the time? Few people realize that you can add share points to your startup items right along with programs. First connect to the computer so the share point is visible on your desktop. Next, simply go to your System Preferences and choose the ‘Accounts’ preferences under the ‘System’ heading. Make sure the lock on the bottom left of the window is unlocked, if not click the lock and enter your password to unlock. On the right side of the window click on the ‘Login Items’ tab and drag the share point from your desktop onto the list of Login Items.
