Yeah, consumables and their replacement times are a pain. One of the reasons I've not bothered with the batteries on a lot of my laptops. They tend to sit on charger and those that do not swell (PowerBooks) I just leave alone. Those that do (2008 MBP) are simply removed.
A lot of this stuff is just powered on and idling.
'This reminds me of a question/request I posted on here a while back, asking whether there was a known utility which could configure how often — and to what degree — a battery could be recharged. The idea behind this was to enable one to set an easy configuration — like in a prefPane — to get a recharge to halt at, say, 80 or 90 per cent, instead of continuing to the system default of “topped off”. This could extend the serviceable lifetime of said consumables.
Unfortunately, the response I got from the thread question was lacklustre at best, and seemed to focus more on back-end, developer-oriented steps one
might be able to take,
or upgrade the OS to a much more recent version to use
one of a couple shareware solutions (Charge Limiter was the suggestion). The latter might be fine — except for those older systems which either cannot run a newer OS or which
can, but one is also willing to accept the performance hit from running the unsupported OS on early Intel Macs. For the Macs on which I still run Snow Leopard, this isn’t really an option.
It's one thing if the stuff is just performing. But if I try something new, or move things around - I can expect problems. I tried that slot thing with my G3 and moved cards around. Now the G3 is not functioning at all and the G4 isn't accepting two 4-port PCI SATA cards. It's still working with the two-port, although a network card 'failed' shortly after the swapping around of stuff I did with the G3.
I spent two hours troubleshooting the G3. I'm not inclined to do more.
Indeed. Then there’s also the periodic commitment to set aside time and money to do a thorough disassembly and clean-out of everything on the gear you do want to keep around. Unless one enjoys doing full disassemblies and clean-outs, then the effort might not be worthwhile (I guess a similar principle also could apply to folks who keep old cars running and maintained, which also requires a lot of money, time, and elbow grease).
I’m thinking about this a lot lately because I am willing to, one more time, take apart my G5 and try something new for cooling the troublesome memory controller heatsink (really, it’s more about planning winter indoor tasks, as one does where it snows and there’s less than 9 hours of daylight). But after that? I won’t be touching it again, unless it’s to dust it out and put it up for sale, in hopes another local collector can take up the mantle of keeping it running.
I added in the 20 inch Cinema Display to the MacPro. A week, week and a half later the 23" Cinema Display decides to fail. I'm sure all of this is coincidence, but it's a primary reason I hate messing with stuff after I've got it up and running. Invariably, what should be a few minutes of changes/addons ends up becoming a troubleshooting session. I'm 52 and I'm tired of spending time with equipment that should (WAS) just fine and working five minutes ago! And because of my setups, nothing is easy to access and I've got cords everywhere.
So, for me, this unplanned and unwelcome maintenance is very annoying. I'm not on the bleeding edge of Apple equipment, but I may have to get closer.
Yah. I’m not much younger than you are, and I’m also sort of hitting that point. That said, my future “newer” gear will probably be something other than what Apple’s been producing, and I’ll probably be committing myself to either Linux or BSD.
