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    MBP few questions

    Discussion in 'Apple and Mac OS X' started by yodachoda, Apr 11, 2012.

  1. yodachoda

    yodachoda Notebook Enthusiast

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    2011 Fall MBP 13"

    1. Should I calibrate the battery?

    2. Does filling the hard drive, emptying it, ect drain some of the memory space? For example, if I start with 10 GB, fill it so there's 1 GB left, then empty it again, will there be only say 9.9 GB left?

    3. Any tips for reducing reflective glossiness?

    4. Is Preview worthless? Can I delete it? It was slow, I downloaded adobe, and adobe works much better as far as I can tell...

    Thanks.
     
    yodachoda, Apr 11, 2012
    #1
  2. bogatyr

    bogatyr Notebook Evangelist

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    1. No need. Apple - Batteries

    2. Nope.

    3. You can try a screen protector that is anti-glare. Others may have more tips for that.

    4. Personally, I prefer Preview. I haven't had any slowdowns or issues with it and I read a lot of technical books that are 500-1000 pages each. In addition, Acrobat always has security issues (not that Preview is perfect!) so I wouldn't recommend it - granted I believe the exploits always target the Windows OS though.
     
    bogatyr, Apr 11, 2012
    #2
  3. saturnotaku

    saturnotaku Notebook Nobel Laureate

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    1. Not necessary.

    2. No.

    3. Don't use the notebook outside or buy a matte screen protector. The latter won't fully eliminate the glare but it will help. I use a Moshi iVisor on my system because it uses static cling to attach to the notebook rather than a sloppy combination of liquid solution, sticky-back plastic, and a credit card, which can cause bubbles unless you're extremely careful. Plus, the iVisor can be cleaned with distilled water and resinstalled so it looks as new.

    4. You could trash the application if you want, but that would cause more problems that simply leaving it and have other programs be associated with the files you want to open. There's no harm leaving Preview as any hard drive space you free up will be minimal at best.
     
    saturnotaku, Apr 11, 2012
    #3
  4. joer80

    joer80 Notebook Evangelist

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    Preview is good to have because it allows you to hit your space bar to look at a file without opening it in your default program. Much faster to preview a jpg or pdf than to open it in an adobe program...
     
    joer80, Apr 12, 2012
    #4
  5. masterchef341

    masterchef341 The guy from The Notebook

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    It could, but it's probably not a concern. There are two things that can happen.

    1. The hard drive could sustain damage to a particular point on the disc surface. The hard drive itself would handle this by marking the sector as bad and no longer using it. It's also possible that the damage causes that sector to no longer have write access (it can't change the magnetic state) - but it can still read the data on the sector. In that case, it's possible that you could have an instance where you have data on your drive, but when you empty the drive, the disk firmware's only choice is to skip that sector, so you won't have all of the space back. This doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the act of filling up the hard drive, and it's not something you should worry about.

    2. Another thing that can occur is file fragmentation. Although Mac OS handles this problem automatically, there could be cases where you at least temporarily lose access to some hard drive space because of the logical arrangement of data on the drive. This wouldn't apply at all if you reformatted the drive, for example.

    ---

    The short version is that I wouldn't worry about losing hard drive space because of using the hard drive. A small amount of space will likely be lost over time due to bad sectors, but that is likely to happen regardless of your usage habits, and it's not going to have any serious impact on your storage capacity.
     
    masterchef341, Apr 13, 2012
    #5