I love MintUpdate.  I'll be first in saying that.  However, I don't like the fact that it checks for updates every five minutes.  I've got ADD (I assume most of you already know that.  Oooo, shiny! ), so even the littlest things can distract me, unless I'm hyper focusing (another side effect of ADD, but a good one if used properly), at which point, even the end of the world wouldn't catch my attention.

Anyhow, as I said, one of my annoyances was that MintUpdate checked for updates every five minutes by default.  That in itself isn't bad.  What *is* bad is that it blinks every time it checks for updates.  (this was fixed in Mint 7, but previous versions still blink)  So you can imagine how easily distracting that can get.

Prior to this, to solve that little issue I would let it do its initial check shortly after logging in, and then if no updates needed to be done, I'd shut it off.  And if there were updates, I'd usually do them and then shut it down afterwards, and it'd stay off the rest of the day.

But with this little trick I no longer have to.  To adjust how often MintUpdate checks for updates, simply click on the system tray icon and open the application.  (you'll need to enter your user password first in order to load it.)  Next, click on “Edit -> Preferences” and then select the “Auto Refresh” tab.  

In this tab you'll notice that there are three adjustable number boxes: Minutes, Hours and Days.  The first says “5” and the other two have “0” in them.  To make it check once every day, change the first (minutes) to “0” and then change the third box (days) to “1”.  If you instead want it to check at a different interval, then adjust these three boxes accordingly with your preferences.

There are two advantages to increasing the time between update checks.  The first is that, obviously the tray icon no longer blinks every five minutes, plus it's pretty much a well known fact that you don't need it checking for updates every five minutes.  That's silly, plus it puts undue load on Mint's servers too.  Most updates don't need to be handled immediately, so you can easily set MintUpdate to check as little as once ever five days, although I recommend no more than once every 24hrs as that way you're no more than a day behind on your updates at most.

I hope this has been helpful for all the Mint users out there.  Enjoy.