This week's quick mac tip deals with the activity monitor utility, which can be found in the utilities folder. For those of you who have recently switched to a mac from windows, the activity monitor is the equivalent of window's task manager.
For those of you who already know about the activity monitor on macs, you may not know that adding this utility to your dock allows you to keep track of your processes at a glance.
Navigate to your utilities folder which is located in your apps folder. You can also just type "activity monitor" into spotlight and it will pop right up.
Launch the activity monitor and up will pop a window with information about your system's processes and available resources. The activity monitor is a great way to keep track of available memory and the load on the CPU, but it isn't so convenient to have to keep this window open.
Luckily, the activity monitor when added to the dock can be set to display real-time information about your system without the need to open its window.
Right-click (or control-click) on the activity monitor icon in your dock when it's running and choose "keep in dock".
Rick-click on it again and navigate to the "dock icon" branch, wherein you will find six different display options: CPU activity, CPU history, network usage, disk activity, memory usage, and the default: show application icon.
By selecting any one of the first five options, the application icon will instead show that type of information about your system in real time. I personally have mine set to memory usage since I tend to do a lot of multitasking and need to keep an eye on my available memory.
Simply choose whichever monitor is most useful to you and you are set. If you want to display more than one monitor, you can do so by right-clicking (ctrl-clicking) the activity monitor in the dock again and choosing the "monitors" branch, wherein you will find several monitors which will float on your desktop.
There are plenty of widgets out there that display all sorts of system information, but if you are anything like me you are unsatisfied with the speed which with dashboard first launches, not to mention the fact that it must be activated every time to see the relevant information.
The docked activity monitor is the best built-in way to keep track of your system's processes and I still meet long time mac owners who don't utilize this option. Enjoy, and happy monitoring!
Right-click (or control-click) on the activity monitor icon in your dock when it's running and choose "keep in dock".
Rick-click on it again and navigate to the "dock icon" branch, wherein you will find six different display options: CPU activity, CPU history, network usage, disk activity, memory usage, and the default: show application icon.
By selecting any one of the first five options, the application icon will instead show that type of information about your system in real time. I personally have mine set to memory usage since I tend to do a lot of multitasking and need to keep an eye on my available memory.
Simply choose whichever monitor is most useful to you and you are set. If you want to display more than one monitor, you can do so by right-clicking (ctrl-clicking) the activity monitor in the dock again and choosing the "monitors" branch, wherein you will find several monitors which will float on your desktop.
