Having a laptop battery that drains quickly is one of the most annoying things I can think of. I bought a laptop over a desktop so I could use my computer anywhere and expect the battery to last enough time to get a decent amount of work done. Whenever I find something that can increase my battery life, I get excited. I recently stumbled across a firmware patch for MacBooks that does just that.
There are many applications which are tiny yet very useful, UnPlugged is one of them. It is a small application for Mac which notifies if power cord of your mac is plugged in or unplugged. It works alikebattery menu item. It shows notifications via Growl, but if it is not installed, then alerts are displayed via the default Alert window.It is built in Cocoa language and consumes very less ram & CPU resources. Once installed it prompts to be added in system preferences panel. If you want to be notified for each specific percentage of battery loss, select it from the UnPlugged system preferences. Lets say if you select 2 percent from the slider given on preferences panel, it will notify you after each 2 percent battery loss. It doesn't use CPU resources as long as there is no change. You can customize different messages which will be displayed when power cord will be plugged or unplugged.
The patch was released in March 2009, but I did not find it until just now. According to Apple: "This update improves the ability of MacBook batteries to maintain a charge when the system is shut down and not used for an extended period of time.
Apple insists that the best way to extend the life of the batteries in a MacBook Pro—at least for my generation MacBook Pro—is to regularly run it off batteries. This would "keep the juices flowing" within the cells and ensure they last longer. This seemed a little self-serving because they use the cycle count (recharge cycles) to determine how old a battery was. If I did as my Apple Genius recommended and cycled my battery constantly I'd have 350+ cycles in less than a year pretty easily. The old Apple page for my MacBook Pro suggested that after 300 cycles my battery should still have 80% of it's charging capacity. The new unibody models are apparently much more efficient and are designed to get to 1000 cycles before dropping to 80% capacity.
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