Monitor your Mac with iStat Pro
December 26, 2008 by Sukrit Dhandhania
When your computer starts getting a little slow it could be due to a number of reasons. One of them is that most of the resources on your computer are being used up. It’s usually the RAM or CPU that are being consumed. So it’s nice to be able to keep an eye on things whenever something goes wrong, or even to prevent something from going wrong. The folks at iSlayer have created the iStat Pro widget for just this purpose.
iStat Pro is probably one of the most useful widgets on my Mac’s Dashboard. As you can see in the image above, I have configured iStat to give me a reading of the CPU, memory, battery, and network. iStat can give you a lot more information than what I have it set to display.
To try it out head over to the iSlayer web page for iStat Pro. The installation is quite straightforward. Click on Download and wait for Safari (or whatever browser you use) to finish downloading. Once its done downloading it will open Dashboard for you and request you to pick a spot to install the widget. After you find it a spot click on Install to complete the installation.
Now that iStat is installed on your Mac we need to configure it to show the data you want to see. For this click on the “i” at the top left hand corner of the widget. This will launch the settings window of the widget.
As you can see in this image there are many items that you can setup to be monitored. The configuration is split into three tabs - “General”, “Sections”, and “Display”. Each of these tabs has multiple options to choose from. So, if you want to make this widget be displayed vertically rather than horizontally, chose the “General” tab, and under the “Skin Type” option select “tall”. Click on “Done” to save new setting. Now the same widget will display like this.
Checkout the other settings options to see if you would like to monitor anything else. You can now just access Dashboard by hitting the F12 key and see how much memory is being eaten up on your machine.
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