The Awesome MacBook Air
In the early days of using the MacBook Air, battery life of 5 hours was not unheard of, especially if I was not doing anything related to video.
For normal browsing, bit of email, and mostly writing (code and English!), battery life was pretty good. Some days I would be out and about, and not plugin till the end of the workday.
Then something changed. Somewhere along the line I started to hear this whirring sound, the fan was on full blast, and battery time was closer to 2-3 hours instead of 4-6. Not cool.
What happened?
Did I install some weird, virus-filled software? Probably not. I’m a little paranoid, and usually keep anti-virus and the like up to the minute.
Did I change some settings while trying to get on to the wireless of one of my favourite coffee shops, which the Mac was stubbornly refusing to detect? May be.
This weekend I decided to figure out what on earth was going on.
Off I went to fire up Activity Monitor, the equivalent of Windows Task Manager. For newbies, you can find it under Applications, Utilities.
Ordering the running processes by CPU utilization, I found something called Adobe Resource Synchronizer eating up 68% CPU! A quick visit with my friend Google confirmed that this indeed was the culprit.
As soon as I killed the process (just select it, and click on Quit Process on top left), the remaining battery life shot up by – wait for it – 1 hour and 40 minutes!
A bit more reading led me to this PC World article on dumping Flash to gain two hours on MacBook. I really should have kept up on the important RSS feeds.
Poking around the issue, I also uncovered a browser extension called ClickToFlash that actually prevents the Flash plugin from starting up in the first place, unless you authorize first. Don’t worry, you can pre-authorize sites like YouTube in advance so you are not constantly nagged.
ClickToFlash is available for Chrome, in Firefox as FlashBlock, in addition to Safari.
With the extensions in place on my browsers, Adobe Resource Synchronizer banished, my love affair with MacBook Air continues in all its honeymoon intensity.
Yes, the MacBook Air is a gorgeous piece of kit – powerful, handbag friendly, fast, and the best productivity gadget I’ve ever had the pleasure to use. If you’re shopping for a laptop (and even if you’re not), get it. Don’t look at anything else. Just get it.
But I digress. Bottom line, I’e discovered I can quite happily live without Flash for the most part, and I can’t say enough good things about the regained added battery life.