Laptop Maintainence

[ankursethi]

I just got a MacBook, and this happens to be the first laptop I've ever owned. I don't really know the dos and don'ts of how not to completely annihilate a brand new laptop.

The major question I want to ask is this : does using your laptop for long periods of time cause damage to the hardware? I ask this because my PC has just blown up and right now I'm using the MacBook to do everything I used to do with my PC. Does using a laptop for more than 4-5 hours at a stretch completely kill it?

Secondly, I've been told that moving your laptop while it's turned on kills the hard drive. How true is this?

Anything else I should know about keeping my laptop safe? I have to make do with this thing for at least 4 years (or longer).

[mkvnmtr]

I donn't think a laptop needs to rest. My 5 year old IBook has spent many weeks without bieng turned off. Downloading and uploading all night and then working all day. As for moving it, It is probably not moving it that will cause the problem. It's the slight jar when you set it down. If it is not important to move it I don't move it. Your newer Macbook has a feature that stops the hard drive if you drop it but that may not work just moving it around.

[Fzang]

I don't know how sensitive macbooks are to damage but my craptop....

It's crappy specs and all but it keeps together pretty good: I hardly ever turn if off (I just close the lid), and it easily runs for 10 hours straight gaming (the laptop gets extremely hot and the fan is shooting fire, might have a bad fan...), I've done that for about a year now and it's still going strong

Besides that, I use it at school so it's in a school bag a lot of the time and I've even bashed my laptop into a table...

If you use your macbook with care you should be just fine :D

PS: I've heard that it lowers battery lifetime if it's plugged in the AC 24/7 together with battery, so you might take it out...

[lisati]

I don't know how it is with MacBooks, but with some laptops the battery life can sometimes turn to mush if you run your machine on AC too much with the batteries fully charged

[solitaire]

Also don't do as I do and use the laptop on soft surfaces. like beds, cushions, pillows! :D plays havoc with the airflow and things get hot fast! :D

Keep it on a hard surface :D

[ankursethi]

Phew! I was worried that using my laptop for more than a couple of hours at a time could kill it. At least that's what somebody on the Internet said. You shouldn't trust what they say on the Internet.

Oh, wait ...

(Thanks, by the way :))

[cyberdork33]

As for moving it, It is probably not moving it that will cause the problem. It's the slight jar when you set it down.
Moving it can be bad, but really it is just if you move it certain ways.

You have spinning discs in your computer (hard drives, cd roms). When these are spinning, thet want to remain in the position that they are currently in. think of a gyroscope, or about the xbox360 scratching the game discs when you move it between standing up and on its side... twisting your computer while the disc is turning (and wants to remain flat) can damage the disc.

There are features to prevent this though, and as long as you aren't flipping your computer all around you will generally not have a problem. Just try to keep it in the same orientation when you standup or move around if it is actively running and spinning the disc(s)

[abgemacht]

If I'm moving from one room to another, I'll put my laptop to sleep and then wake it back up. Takes only about 2 seconds. My laptop has a program to pause the harddrive, so if I'm just moving from one end of the table to the other, I don't worry about it.

If you're using your laptop on AC for a long time, you may want to remove the battery (can macs do this?) A lot of laptops drain the battery at the same time it's being charged by AC, instead of just powering straight through AC. This does have the potential to damage battery life. Do a little reading and see if this is an issue for macs.

[stream303]

I don't know how it is with MacBooks, but with some laptops the battery life can sometimes turn to mush if you run your machine on AC too much with the batteries fully charged

This is true of any laptop with a rechargeable lithium battery.

They just don't like to be sitting around at 100% full charge all the time. And you don't want to always drain them completely - they like being topped off frequently.

Fully draining them *once in awhile* helps to keep your battery gauge calibrated, and keep the machine from shutting down prematurely.

The trick to lithium battery recharge-cycle specs is that they are based on a FULL charge and complete drain cycle. You can get a lot of life out of them if you just top them off when you can. While they can be used in a full-charge / full-discharge cycle, you'll only get the specified life out of them that way, typically 300-500 complete cycles like that. Top-off cycles can run into the thousands.

So ideally, if you use your laptop as a desktop replacement, pull the battery, but there is another caveat:

Since they don't like sitting around at 100% full charge, if you decide to remove it and store it, don't store it fully charged! Drain the battery to about 50% or so before putting it away. Something to keep in mind if you are going on a long vacation, etc.

From a practical standpoint, if you aren't going to pull the battery, and are using it as a desktop replacement, perhaps fully drain and recharge the battery once about once every other month or so.

Don't stockpile lithium batteries. It might seem to be a good idea to grab a spare laptop battery, charge it to 50% and store it. However, if you leave it there for 5 years, its ability to store a charge will weaken due to the aging of the internal chemistry. It would probably be better to just buy a fresh lithium replacement that was recently made. (You'd have to check to be sure of the manufacturing date.)

There is a lot of battery info out there, but while reading, make sure you are reading about rechargeable lithium, and not some other chemistry such as NiMh (Nickel Metal Hydride) or the much older NiCad (Nickel Cadmium), which have different requirements for getting the most life out of them.

What I do if I don't feel like removing the battery completely is just run off batteries down to about 50% or so every week.

[starcannon]

Modern laptops have anti-shock technology in them; that said, gently moving them and setting them down is not going to harm things. However, even a small drop that does no cosmetic damage may be enough to cause the stylus to skate across the hdd plate if the thing is turned on, so be careful. There are "rugged" laptops that can handle this, Toughbooks are an example.

The battery caveat listed earlier may be true, but newer batteries are "smart" and are supposed to protect themselves from this kind of premature death. I'd call Apple and get their official position on their particular batteries just to be certain though. If you want to be overly cautious, you can always just pull the battery before turning it on on AC, we use this dv2600 plugged into the wall nearly full time for a year now, and when we do use it on battery power it goes for about 4 hours still so in our case the batteries do not over charge.

The ultimate anti-shock drive is an SSD drive, currently price prohibitive, but coming down in price very fast, watch the market, you'll want one when they are competitive with hdd's.

Using your laptop for long periods of time won't damage it, we have an HP dv2600 thats on 24hours a day 7 days a week, no problems. Do use compressed air to blow the intake and exhaust ports out regularly (the kind you buy in a can), and do get some optical wipes to keep your display screen wiped down. And above all else HAVE FUN!!! you got a Mac Baby!!! yeah! and you have linux on it, double fun action there.

GL

[stream303]

You just reminded me that I've got to clean my laptop running the SETI number cruncher!

The battery caveat listed earlier may be true, but newer batteries are "smart" and are supposed to protect themselves from this kind of premature death.

Mostly it is due to smart charging circuitry, which is critical for Lithiums not to be overcharged. However, you can run into premature death by extreme temps, always sitting at 100% charge, (even though they may be smartly trickle-charging) and extreme discharge by ignoring them for a long time.

I'd call Apple and get their official position on their particular batteries just to be certain though.

http://www.apple.com/batteries/notebooks.html

To the unwary, they might assume that their battery is only good for 300 charges or so if they read through it quickly and not realize that the spec is for when you do a full-discharge before recharge all the time. If you top them off after slight usage, they will last much longer - keeping in mind that they don't like to sit at 100% idling all the time.

They don't mention stockpiling spares. :) If you do have a spare, follow their guidelines and charge it to about 50% before storage, AND check on it every once in awhile to make sure it hasn't fully drained to the danger point of deep-discharge. Bettery yet, rotate the spare into service every so often. Even better would be to just buy a new one when you need it, as the chemistry is the freshest as long as you check the manufacturing date.

That battery page from Apple is probably the best one I've ever seen from a computer manufacturer.

[natrik]

Lithium Ion batteries, for example your laptop battery, can easily be damaged (reduced runtime, early end-of-life, etc) by routine use, especially if you're unaware of the following:

The LiIon chemistry doesn't like being kept at 100%, (and it really kills them to be topped off, like keeping them on A/C). I've had quite good results (cellphone batteries) storing them at 1 or 2 bars of battery (out of four). I've had bad results storing them at full charge. (NiCd and Lead Acid batteries LOVE to be kept at full or on a charger. I can't speak for NiMH.)

They don't like being HOT! They hotter they get, the more damage they can take on. The damage done is relative to the charge of the battery. The more power it has, the greater it harms itself in heat. Therefore keeping a charged cellphone or laptop battery in your hot car will kill it fast. (This is also true for NiMH and NiCd chemistry batteries.)

They don't like being IDLE. Storage in general will reduce the charge capacity of almost(?) any rechargable battery.

Here's some things I do to care for my expensive-to-replace laptop battery:
- give it action: I use Suspend mode (suspend to ram) frequently when I know I'll probably be back before the battery charge is gone.
- keep it cool: I have little feet (Cool Feet - see thinkgeek.com) to provide airspace underneath. Plus, in conjunction with a scrap of foamboard, my legs don't get rashes. ;-p
- keep it less than full charge: I plug in / unplug my system when it's going to be on AC for a while. It would be awesome to have a power applet to do the work and remember for me. I let it go down to 30%-60% (depending on when I remember to look) before recharging. 100% charge isn't too bad if you start using it right away, but I usually unplug close to 80%-90% just so I can turn it off at less than 100%. I try to leave it idle (laptop off for x days at a time) with 40%-60% charge.

My replacement battery (doing these things) is lasting much longer, and has more of a capacity per-charge than the two I inadvertently murdered.

Don't kill another battery!

Further reading:
- search for: lithium liion battery health tips
- wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_ion_battery

I know some posts say all this above mine, I just copied/pasted this from an email I just wrote yesterday.

-Nate

Edit: oh yeah, this is what killed the first one:

Keeping laptop on A/C with battery in, keeping a full charge whenever possible. Leaving it in my car trunk (heat). Keeping a spare (also dead now) at 100%, and hardly ever using it.

[natrik]

The following I found on a Gentoo forum (http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-175419-postdays-0-postorder-asc-start-0.html?sid=619cda6e4dae2a0651c474f9f5e4dfcf):


Swappiness takes a value between 0 and 100 to change the balance between swapping applications and freeing cache. At 100, the kernel will always prefer to find inactive pages and swap them out; in other cases, whether a swapout occurs depends on how much application memory is in use and how poorly the cache is doing at finding and releasing inactive items.

The default swappiness is 60. A value of 0 gives something close to the old behavior where applications that wanted memory could shrink the cache to a tiny fraction of RAM. For laptops which would prefer to let their disk spin down, a value of 20 or less is recommended.

As a sysctl, the swappiness can be set at runtime with either of the following commands:
Code:
# sysctl -w vm.swappiness=30
# echo 30 >/proc/sys/vm/swappiness

The default when Gentoo boots can also be set in /etc/sysctl.conf:
Code:
# Control how much the kernel should favor swapping out applications (0-100)
vm.swappiness = 30


Some patchsets allow the kernel to auto-tune the swappiness level as it sees fit; they may not keep a user-set value.

Read the rest of the article (http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-175419-postdays-0-postorder-asc-start-0.html?sid=619cda6e4dae2a0651c474f9f5e4dfcf). This is just a small piece of it.

-- Nate