MacBook maintenance questions… Waiting for my controller to arrive
After using a variety of my friends equipment for the past while now, I have finally stopped borrowing and just recently purchased a VCI 100 which should be arriving in the next couple days. I am super excited and want to make sure my MacBook is ready for the long haul. I am curious about the following questions:
What can I do to get/keep my MacBook in tip top shape for performance and longevity? Any big no-no’s?
I can tell it is running much slower than when it was new (Dec. 2008) and this is a big concern for me as this is also my main computer for school and home.
My battery does not hold a charge for long periods of time (especially when running Traktor/controller(s)/etc.) due to it’s age which concerns me for long nights I won’t not have access to keep it charging.
Is my best bet to buy a new one and if so what are some tips to retaining it’s life?
The computer runs very hot at times, even with minimal programs running. How can I avoid this or is common?
If you have an SSD…it’s probably old enough that it needs to be reformatted. There’s a weird technical issue with a lot of the early ones that lead them to slow down for small file writes (like log files) as they get used. The solution is time machine + reformat/reinstall + restore from time machine…or buy a newer SSD. Other than that, just make sure you have some available disk space and haven’t installed a lot of crap that keeps running…it hasn’t been my experience that OS X just slows down on its own.
As for the battery…charge it every chance you get. All the way. Leave it plugged in when it’s fully charged. All the stuff you might have heard about needing to cycle the battery is dead wrong. And the BS idea that you need to take the battery out when it’s at 100% or not leave it plugged in when charged is equally crap.
I’m fairly certain that these ideas were made up by battery companies to make people destroy their batteries prematurely and have to buy new ones.
Also, try to find coconutBattery. I think it’s from something like coconut-flavor.com or some weird spelling thereof. It tells you some stats about it. For example, my macbook is 38 months old. The battery originally held 5020mAh (miliampere hours) and currently holds 4712mAh…so it’s only lost 7% in over a year and a half…and holds charge for a bit over 2 and a half hours instead of just under 3 with my version of normal use and the screen brightness all the way up.
Caffeine and InsomniaX are useful little utilities you might not have found yet. If you use it to run servers, NoobProof is an easy interface to its firewall. OmniDiskSweeper can help find big files you might have forgotten about if you’re running low on disk space.
OnyX is a great little utility. It does a lot. I can update prebindings, your spotlight index, file permissions…clean up your caches…run unix maintenance scripts without learning CLI…and change some deeper settings that are sometimes hard to find. It’s awesome. I think it’s free, but if it costs money it’s worth it unless you’re already familiar with how to do all that.
And SoundFlower has been amazing for routing audio between applications. Think of it like ReWire without requiring either application to support rewire. I think Jack does the same stuff, but IDK how well it works because I haven’t actually tried it.
Oh…and I have clamXav installed. I run it every now and then, usually after downloading pr0n or any time a windows computer logs onto my home wifi.
