> On Oct 30, 2015, at 4:27 PM, "Richard D. Meadows" <[email protected]> wrote: > > 1. My MacBook Pro kind of crapped out on me this morning. I came in and > opened it and logged in. Then it gave a message that my battery was at 9% and > was shutting down unless I plugged it in. It was plugged in. I shut it > down, undid that power pack and got my spare I keep in my bag and plugged it > in and hooked it up to the laptop. I powered it up and was at 100% for about > 5 seconds and then it went to 9% again and I just shut it down. So is it > the battery or could I have two bad power packs? I will say this. I rarely > just use it on battery, as it is basically my desktop computer so I leave it > plugged in.
Sounds like a bad charging circuit to me. If it is a separate board (sometimes), it should be easy and not too expensive to fix. If it’s part of the mother board, then it may be time for a new computer. Again, depending on which model you have. If you are swapping out batteries, that tells me you are using an older (pre-2011) MBP, which is good news and bad news: possibly cheaper for this repair, but a working machine is worth less. If you are thinking it’s time for a new machine, sell the laptop as-is and buy a new one. > > 2. My MacBook Air. > <Screen Shot 2015-10-30 at 4.17.45 PM.png> > How do I find and clear the OTHER files. It appears they are taking up most > of the space on this drive. It’s a 60 gig flash drive. My favorite "easy way" to tell what’s taking up the most space, is to switch a Finder window to list view and sort by size, larger to smaller. Go into View:View Options and check Calculate All Sizes. After a few minutes all your folders will display a size with the largest ones at the top of the list. Then just open each folder to see what the biggest folders and files are. That usually finds me something that I don’t need. Another thing that saves a surprising amount of space is a tool called MonoLingual. It can remove all non-English language files from your computer, trashing all the work of those kind app developers that created localized versions for a bunch of countries. Languages you will never speak. Or read. Or care about. Another approach is to look at what options OWC has for larger SSD drives for your Air. They sell kits that include a larger internal drive and an external housing for your old drive that you can use as a large speedy USB drive. Look up your machine here and then select “Internal Drive Options:” http://eshop.macsales.com/MyOWC/ > > 3. What is the best App to use for backing up this drive. I don’t want to > use Time Machine, but just something that I can run every 10 days or so to do > a full copy. Most of my data is out there in the cloud someplace. There are two awesome cloning tools: SuperDuper and Carbon Copy Cloner. They both make great bootable clones and they both have a plethora of features. You can’t go wrong with either one. I happen to use SD, but others on the list use CCC with great success. It’s kind of like whether you prefer Mercedes or BMW. I run it every night on all my machines. Then if I have a catastrophic failure, I just buy a new drive, clone the backup back to that drive and I’m up and running in a matter of hours. I have even rented MBPs from everyone’s favorite non-Apple Mac store (while mine was being repaired), plugged in the backup and booted from that. I was literally back in business in less than an hour. I highly recommend the “cloning” method. Jonathan -- Jonathan Fletcher [email protected] Kentuckiana FileMaker Developers Group Next Meeting: 11/24/15 _______________________________________________ MacGroup mailing list [email protected] http://www.math.louisville.edu/mailman/listinfo/macgroup
