Tools

Monitor your Mac from the menu bar

Monitor network use
from your menubar.

All good geeks want to know what’s happening inside their computers, don’t they? What do you mean, “no”? Well, OK… but for those who do, and who use a Mac, there’s a nifty way of getting your system information into the menu bar so that you can keep an eye on it without having to open another program.

iSlayer’s iStat menus allow you to populate your menu bar with mini widgets that can help you keep an eye on the computer’s temperature, network usage, memory usage, and a raft of other useful information.

Some of you might be wondering why on earth you would want to do this, but there are a few things it can be good to monitor. Network usage, for instance. On Windows I was always able to get the network icon in the system tray and see from that whether my computer was transmitting or receiving network data. I haven’t found such an option on the Mac, so by adding a network monitor to my menu bar I can now see when the network is in use. That’s great if you’re worried about malware sending sensitive data home, or if you just want to see whether Firefox is working hard or has stopped working altogether :)

Monitoring memory or CPU usage can also tell you whether you are overtaxing your computer and should shut a few programs down, whilst monitoring the disk usage and activity can tell you whether you are running out of space (at a glance) or whether a poorly program is constantly trying to read data.

In the normal course of things you shouldn’t really have to care about this stuff, but if your computer starts acting a little odd it’s great to be able to do a little diagnosis quickly.

While we’re thinking about it, it’s worth pointing out that iSlayer also provide two system monitoring widgets for the dashboard and a nifty to-do manager. All their tools are free, and run on Mac OS X.

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