OK. It’s the Friday before Christmas. Some of you are finishing up the work week, getting ready to enjoy a relaxing weekend before the big day on Monday. You’re relaxing because you’re one of those blessed individuals that do their holiday shopping early. Some do their shopping very early. My blessed mother-in-law once sent us a box containing wrapped Christmas presents in July. We squirreled the box away, and by December had actually forgotten where we put it. Thankfully, we found it in the (Saint) Nick of time.

These days, with the advent of online stores and overnight shipping, it’s easy to get complacent and procrastinate. One of the many lavish presents I’m bestowing on the fetching Mrs. Z was ordered online late Sunday (Sunday!) night, shipped out first thing Monday morning, and was delivered by someone in a brown truck on Tuesday morning. Apple claims on their online store that if you order one of their standard configuration (or even “popular custom configuration”) MacBooks, MacBook Pros, Mac Pros, or iMacs by noon on December 21st, with overnight shipping, you can get the machine by December 25th. A lot of good that does you now, being the 22nd and all, but it is impressive.

This amazes me, as I ordered a relatively simple by technology standards, not built-to-order, waffle iron from an online retailer on December 15th, and it’ll be touch-and-go whether it gets to the lucky recipient by the end of this year. Maybe I should’ve given them a laptop. They could make waffles on the scorching underside of the dual-core portable processing powerhouse. But, I digress.

So, let’s assume you’ve arranged your techno “big ticket items” under the tree. Are you fully prepared for life after the area around the tree is littered with hastily torn wrapping paper and the tech toys are unboxed for the first time?

Batteries. It’s hard to escape batteries in many tech toys. I recently purchased a point-and-shoot digital camera. Inside the box were two AA batteries. Not Energizers, Duracells, or Rayovacs, mind you. These were obviously way down the battery food chain. I placed them in the camera (hey, they came with it and were “free”), and then for some dumb reason couldn’t understand why I saw a flashing “Battery Low” message on the camera’s viewscreen after what seemed like just a few shots.

What I’m getting at is you really can’t know the age of the batteries packaged in a lot of electronic gadgets. To make sure that your new digital camera is still capable of snapping shots later in the day when you’ve traveled to visit friends or family and all the stores are closed, have a few “new” batteries on hand.

What about more sophisticated batteries, like those employed on notebook/portable/laptop computers? I can’t speak for all species, but every new PowerBook I’ve ever received had some charge in the battery when it came out of the box. Being a portable computer, the first thing you’ll want to do after taking it out of the box is, well, be portable with it. Unencumbered by power or Ethernet cables, you’ll prance around, computing freely in every odd corner of the premises.

But is that good for the battery? Actually, according to the “Getting Started” guide for new Apple notebooks, Apple suggests fully charging your portable when you plug it in for the first time. If that first charging is after you’ve drained the battery completely (the point where the battery remaining indicator says “0%” and the MacBook goes to sleep), that process actually calibrates the battery and prepares it for peak performance (at least until it needs to be recalibrated again).

© 2006 Peter F. Zimowski