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The Ultimate Guide for switching from a PC to a Mac
(Part 2 - coming soon)

Thursday, May 17, 2007

Activity monitor in your Dock!

Activity Monitor is a pretty geeky app, but it is a truly amazing one as well! System slowdowns are usually caused by processes happening in the background that can occupy a lot of your ram or your processor. Even though there are no known virus for Macs, performance can still be affected by bugs or corrupted data. It is also really cool to watch Activity Monitor when pushing the processor to the limit with video encoding or another demanding task. Well, this can be done without having yet another window taking up precious screen real estate. In fact, it can be done right from the Dock. If you click the activity monitor icon in the dock and hold it for a few seconds, a menu will pop up. From there you can choose "Show CPU usage" in "Dock icon".


The icon will turn into bars that indicate the load of the CPU. Two cores:

Four cores:

10 Comments:

Blogger E to the M said...

I love this, thanks!

May 16, 2007 at 9:35 PM  
Blogger Unknown said...

you can also get the istat pro widget, it works really well too!

May 16, 2007 at 11:08 PM  
Blogger BJM said...

Yes, this is, indeed, a very good tip! I found this application in my OSX computer in Application/Utilities and once I dragged it into the dock the instructions worked as described.

May 17, 2007 at 4:02 AM  
Blogger Unknown said...

I'm using istat, too! Very useful widget

Sorry, OT - but does anyone know why there is a process called "MassStorage", which sometimes causes a cpu-load of 140% until I reboot my MacMini?

I can't unmount the usbsticks or sd-cards then, because one or more processes still use the device, probably "MassStorage".

Maybe someone has an idea how to fix it.
xenonart

May 17, 2007 at 4:53 AM  
Blogger Bill Petro said...

What am I missing? I've had Activity Monitor in my Dock for ages, but when I left-click-hold all I get is:

Remove from Dock
Open at Login
Show in Finder
--
Open

Thanks in advance for advice.

May 17, 2007 at 4:59 PM  
Blogger Atreus said...

Firstly, thanks for this tip! I have the iStat widget, but now I don't even have to press f12 :v

anyway, bill...open it up first.

May 17, 2007 at 5:36 PM  
Blogger Unknown said...

my activity monitor doesn't function at all, anybody know why?

May 18, 2007 at 9:21 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Bill Petro, that is because ativity monitor is not on. Click it in your dock to turn it on, then proceed with the instructions. HTH

May 18, 2007 at 11:06 AM  
Blogger Dasein said...

Doesn't this use ram as well? Its cool but ~ isn't is odd? Using the cpu to monitor how I am using cpu?

May 23, 2007 at 1:08 PM  
Blogger Katie said...

"Bill Petro said...
What am I missing? I've had Activity Monitor in my Dock for ages, but when I left-click-hold all I get is:

Remove from Dock
Open at Login
Show in Finder
--
Open"

Mine does the same thing.

All I did was open the Activity Monitor, click on "View" (up there next to the "File" menu) and then select "Dock Icon" and click on whatever you want to show in the dock.

July 28, 2007 at 6:00 PM  

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