iStat menus - Keep an eye on various system functions
Jun 16, '08 06:45:00AM
Contributed by: robg
The macosxhints Rating:

[Score: 9 out of 10]
For years, I've used Raging Menace's free MenuMeters (Pick of the Week write-up) to keep an eye on my system. Although I've tried other apps over the years, this week's Pick is the first one that has me seriously considering changing my system monitoring utility. As with MenuMeters, iStat menus lets you monitor various system activities via menu bar icons. Also as with MenuMeters, you can monitor CPU usage, disk space, memory usage, and network activity. Buy you can also add icons to watch temperatures, fan speeds and power usage, Bluetooth, and even replace the stock date and time feature.
You can customize the appearance of each menu bar icon, as well as disable those you have no interest in seeing. When you click on a given menubar icon, you're given more information about that particular category of activity. For instance, when I click the CPU icon, I get a breakdown on usage between user, system, nice and idle processes, a live graph of CPU usage over time by core, the top five CPU-using processes, some data on loads and uptimes, and an icon to launch Activity Monitor. MenuMeters, by comparison, shows uptime, a task and thread count, and load averages (and buttons for Activity Monitor and Console). You'll get similar detail on the other options in iStat menus.
The replacement date and time function is a nice addition -- when you click the time, you'll get a full month's calendar in the menu that appears, and options to open the Date & Time System Preferences panel or iCal. (You can't, however, see any iCal events or to-do's on the calendar; for that, I really like MenuCalendarClock for iCal.)
iStat menus is a very useful system monitoring tool, and at the moment, I'm trying to decide exactly which to keep using--I prefer some of the icon display options and appearances in MenuMeters, but I like the additional tools and features in iStat menus. (If you'd like more info on iStat menus, including a number of screenshots, Macworld covered it in this recent Mac Gems entry.) As both are free to use, though, there's no cost to trying both and sticking with the one that works best for you.
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