OS X 10.2.x and battery problems

Laptop Batteries: "I was having the same problem mentioned where my iBook would go from a 90% charge to nothing very quickly and what I did was turn off the battery status monitor in the menu bar. My battery has been fine ever since. I have not tried turning that status indicator back on since. I imagine the code that causes this error may be in the menu bar widget code. Just a thought."

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See discussions at:

http://www.macintouch.com/laptopbatt.html

and

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=2003071622115360&query=nvram

I'm seeing a similar thing, battery gets to 30% then dies without warning. I've seen a few mentions implicating bad bugs in the menu bar status indicator.

I've also seen mention of improvements with booting to OS 9 then charging there. I'm going to try removing the battery status indicator from the menu bar. (I've already tried Apple's tip to reset the PMU.)

OS X Power Management: Using PMSET

macosxhints - Get the most from X!: "Authored by: serres on Sun, Nov 17 '02 at 03:04AM

pmset - modify power management settings

since 10.1.4 (?) we have a command line utility called 'pmset', see

% man pmset

with it you can modify the relevant power manager related settings available in mac os x (i looked at the source intensively). it even has some commented out stuff for future use like the 'wake from sleep at some date' setting we had in mac os 9. for some non-understandable reason these are not implemented in the mac os x power manager library :(

you should also use this utility to modifiy the PowerManagement.xml file.

i think what's *very* important to save battery power is to enable the 'Reduce Processor speed' setting."

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pmset must be run as root. If you type pmset alone you get a helpful example.

Locking Windows XP

Different Ways to Lock Windows XP

Parents with kids need a way to lock the PC -- stat. This page says how to do it in XP, it was easier in NT and 2000!

NAV subscriptions: moving between machines

If you move to a new machine, you lose your NAV subscription. The only way I know to move it with the machine is based on the following. I've not verified it yet.


First uninstall NAV/NORTON PRODUCT and then delete this file: 'Catalog.LiveSubscribe' It can be found in one of the folders below.

For Win 9x/Me go to this folder:
C:\WINDOWS\All Users\Application Data\Symantec\LiveSubscribe

For Win Xp/2k users, go to this folder:
C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Symantec\LiveSubscribe

Now re-boot and re-install your NORTON PRODUCT, that's it... your LiveUpdate subscription is back up and running for another year!'"

RagTime Publishing software for OS X

RagTime GmbH, Home of RagTime

So, instead of a word processor maybe I should go all the way to a German cross-platform desktop publishing tool?

DVD drives used by Aple in their machines

MacInTouch Home Page: Apple/Macintosh news, information and analysis

Purchased an eMac from a CompUSA in West Des Moines, Iowa. two weeks ago during a financing special. Checked the demo eMac's system profiler to make sure it had a (4x) superdrive, thought it came back as a Pioneer A105 mechanism.

Well, to my suprise when I got home with the 1GHz eMac I purchased, the system profiler came back with a SONY DVD RW DW-U10A mechanism. (device serial EA41CD16 and device revision A13d)

Looked up this drive on the Sony website and it shows that it is a DVD-/+R -/+RW 4x mechanism.?

Tried a DVD+R and it recognized the disc, but as CD-R disk. DVD-R's worked fine.

Photo to Movie 2.2 for Mac OS X

Photo to Movie$50 -- for Peter.