Noticed that your Mac has become a little sluggish lately? Not sure if you’ve got enough memory for the programs you are running or how much space you’ve got left on your hard disk? Well, it sounds as though you ought to check out the Activity Monitor. This handy visual utility gives you a comprehensive snapshot on the health and well being of your Mac.
So where can you find the Activity Monitor. Well, its hidden away in the Utilities folder which you can find by opening Finder, clicking on Applications and then Utilities. Click on the Activity Monitor icon and you’ll get a new window like the one below.
The default window shows what processes are running on your machine and how much system resources they are using. Click on the % CPU column header to order them. This might show for instance that you’ve left a hungry program running in the background by mistake which is taking a lot of your processing power without you even knowing.
Click on the System Memory tab towards the bottom of the screen and take a look at how your RAM is being utilised and, importantly, how much of your total is currently free. Perhaps it’ll show that you really do need to dig into that wallet and buy some more memory!
Click on the Disk Usage tab, select the hard drive if your system has more than one, and check how much free space you have. Less than 15%, then you should start thinking seriously about archiving some of those files, deleting stuff which you no longer need, or simply investing in some more storage.
You can monitor most of the important aspects of your Mac’s health right here in the Activity Monitor. Get in the habit of checking it out every so often. Don’t wait until you have a problem. By monitoring regularly, you’ll get to know what’s the norm for your machine when its healthy which in turn may make diagnosing future performance problems a whole lot easier.