Category: Tech

Have you ever wondered why the battery life seems shorter and shorter? Karen is always envious of my laptop habits because her 5 minute battery life can’t touch the 5 hours from mine. Heck, she might as well be moving a desktop around if she’s always plugging in! I thought the problem might have been constant plugging in, so I began cycling my batteries by fully charging it and then running it almost all the way and fully charging it again. I was so wrong.

Most laptop batteries use Lithium Ion (Li-Ion), and the best thing to do is to discharge partially, and charge partially. Frequent full discharges are bad for the battery, and the effects are permanent. So if you’ve loved walking to the kitchen with your pajamas and surfing the web while you snack away, you may inadvertently be wearing out your battery! (reference for the skeptics: http://www.batteryuniversity.com)

So how do you check if your battery is worn out from abuse? Well, I found this nifty tool called Centrino Hardware Control that can tell you…

As you can see, after only owning my laptop for a few months, my battery wear level is already at 4%, but that’s not as bad as my coworker who bought his laptop later and is already at 15%! He’s also a cycler, and by that I don’t mean he joins Johnny on his biking expeditions. By the way, it is okay to cycle your batteries once a month to reset the memory electronics in the battery, but that’s about it. Now you know how to maximize your laptop battery life!

While we’re on the subject, I have a quick tip for you geeks out there. You can use the same tool to lower the voltage of your CPU. Why? To lower the temperature and increase battery life. I’ve lowered mine from 0.9 to 0.7 volts at 600 MHz, and it runs much quieter and cooler and longer. Except for the occasional smoke and burnt rubber smell, everything is good! Okay, I’m kidding there, but you do risk crashing your system if the voltage is too low, so tweak it at the lowest stable voltage and you’re golden! If you’re not a geek and would like to live on the edge, I recommend you make friends with some geeks and utilize the free support that comes along with it. 😛

As a worship leader, I constantly scout new songs to introduce to the congregation, but to introduce a song, I need memorize the song forwards, backwards and upside down. What about songs absent from my pitiful CD collection? I came across Napster, which offers $9.99 unlimited streaming for free. Sounds good, right?

Wrong.

Literally, it doesn’t sound good. The music volume seems to oscillate sporadically, drawing you in the music one minute and dropping you cold the next. The quality is far inferior to CD, lacking in the deepness and precision of the bass, but no surprises here considering the compression that needs to take place. In addition, some of the songs I wanted to listen to contained a “buy only” button, requiring a purchase to get beyond the pathetic 30 second clip that leaves you hanging. Worst of all, at the end of the year, you would have paid all this money and end up owning nada. The minute you stop subscribing, you have zilch.

The bottomline is, for $120 a year, you’re better off treating yourself to real CDs. Not only do they sound better, but you can feel that you really own the songs.