Activity Monitor

I like to keep an eye on what is happening on my Mac and a utility that I have used for a long time is MenuMeters. This is a menu bar utility that shows processor usage, disk usage, upload and download speed, and free and used memory. This utility makes it easy to spot problems that might otherwise be missed and it highlighted an issue with ksfetch.

How soon after starting your Mac can you begin to use it? Why is it so slow? What is it doing? Is it OK to turn off or restart? OS X works hard behind the scenes on a variety of tasks, but you would never know because often nothing is displayed on the screen.

Do you know which applications use the most processing power in your Mac? Which apps does your iMac or Macbook spend the most time processing? It might be useful to find out and if your computer is running more slowly than you think it should be, it might enable you to identify the problem.