The Lance J. Technoweb

So you have a smartphone or laptop that you've owned for a year or two and the battery seems to lose charge very quickly.  However, some batteries in a friend's identical device seems to have lasted for years longer!  So what's the deal? The deal is that modern devices use lithium-ion batteries, and it is very easy to mistakenly misuse a lithium-ion battery.  What?  A misuse a battery?  How does THAT happen? The common killer of lithium-ion batteries is heat.  Heat just sucks the life out of a lithium-ion battery, and they never, ever recover.  My goal for battery care is to always avoid unreasonable heat.  So here's the short list of the rules I follow for long battery life: Never leave a device in a car.  Cars interiors can get very hot.  If I leave my device in the car even once for 15 minutes, where the temperature can get over 120 °F, I have forever stolen some life out of my battery's soul. Never leave a device in the ho...

A lot of people as me about the best utilities to install to improve Mac performance and reliability.   This is a great question, and I'm going to answer that here. I use just about the oldest supported Mac, and it works great.  But it has taken some work to make it great.  If you have a slow Mac, it is likely easily fixable! Here is my step-wise procedure for trying to address a slow Mac: Common Mac Performance Issues There are a few common things that greatly slow down your Mac: Out of Date software Lack of Disk Storage Sick Hard Disk Drive Slow Hard Drive Lack of Memory Bad "repair" software   My Speed-up-that-Mac procedure Restart.  There's nothing like a restart to clear out memory. Empty Trash, which frees up some disk space. Software Update.  OS updates and core applications should be kept up to date. App Update.  Applications and  Plug-ins should be kept up to date. Disk Utility First Aid/Repair. Networking: Restar...

At this time we have installed Sierra on about 50% of the Macs we maintain, and so far it is going well.  Performance and reliability seems on-par with El Capitan: No kernel panics No significant bugs/failures or "first party" app crashes No app compatibility issues No performance issues No data migration issues (we use Migration Assistant)  Here is our hardware minimum: 4 GB of RAM.  We have Sierra running well on machines with 4 GB of RAM.   Although the majority of our Macs have 8 GB, 4 GB is totally acceptable.  We haven't had a machine with less than 4 GB of memory for several years. As we've said earlier, if you're upgrading from less than 4 GB of RAM and need to buy new RAM, we suggest buying 8 GB. Amount Today Advice Rough Price Less than 4 GB Go to 8 GB $40 4GB + Do nothing $0 Non-Traditional Drive.   As of earlier this year, we no longer have any traditional hard drives in o...