Efficient Flying

Your experience with the Air (or any laptop for that matter) will improve a lot if you think in terms of being frugal with the processor, memory and battery. The three are interrelated, so improving the performance of one will improve all. The following tips will get you more battery time and faster speeds at Panera:

• Close down apps. Having ten open apps will slow things way down. The easy way is to put four fingers on your trackpad and swipe left. Scroll through the apps you want to close with two fingers and press the Q key.
  
• A lot of open windows or tabs in Safari or Firefox can take up memory. Only keep open what's necessary.
• Downloading a lot of files will slow things down. Download when plugged into juice.
• The Superdrive will cut battery time in half. It's best run when plugged into an outlet.
• Shut down the Air if you're not using it for 6 hours or more. The sleep mode will still burn battery. Leaving it sleeping and unplugged all weekend will burn a noticeable amount of battery by Monday morning.
• This should go without saying, but keep your Air fully charged.
• Hold down the F5 key to turn down the lighting for the keyboard keys.
  
• Format any external drive into HFS format, unless you're planning on using it with a PC too. Drives are normally formatted in FAT32, which is a MS format that Macs can read. HFS is a native Mac format that will speed things up and reduce a little power consumption. It will greatly speed up Spotlight searches.
• When new Intel-based apps upgrades are available, upgrade. Older PowerPC apps require the Rosetta emulator to run, which takes up more power and memory. You might also try to find alternatives to your PPC apps that are Intel-based.
• Don't keep a lot of files on your desktop. OSX sees your desktop as an open folder and spends resources rendering thumbnails and indexing all those files. Create a Junk Drawer folder on your desktop and drop stray files into until you have time to file them.
• Keep Dash Trash on your dock to exit all apps in your dashboard. When you open the dashboard it opens all those apps and keeps them running until you restart your Air. Trashing dock apps when not in use gives you more working RAM.
• If using Time Machine, go to System Preferences/Time Machine and uncheck Backup While On Battery Power. All will backup on schedule when plugged in, but won't burn the extra power when you're not plugged in. And realize that using your Time Capsule remotely for intense file transfer burns power at an alarming rate.
• If using MobileMe, set it to sync manually.
  
• Zap the PRAM (parameter random access memory). This is where your Mac stores various settings which can get outdated and stuck. It goes a step beyond restarting your air. Press the power button and hold Command-Option-P-R. Release after the second startup chime.
• Turn off Bluetooth. Bluetooth burns a little power and slows down WiFi, especially when the signal is weak or has many connections. If you're not using it with any BT device at the moment, turn it off.
• If you're not using WiFi when on battery, turn your Airport on your Air off through the WiFi icon in the menubar. It burns more energy looking for WiFi than actually using it.
  
• If the fan starts, you're processing a lot and burning battery at a rapid rate. Go over this list and see what you can do to run leaner.