life in mordor :: mike frizzell’s blog

While OS X offers you plenty of good tools to get into the geekier side of your computer, monitoring your system can be a bit difficult.  Enter iStat Menus, which gives the user the ability to monitor everything from temperature to RAM usage to network bandwidth from the menu bar.  Available for free at iSlayer.com (although if you like it you should donate), iStat Menus will soon become an invaluable part of your Mac.

Getting Started
In order to get started, all you have to do is click on iStat Menus under Other in System Preferences.  From there, you can customize it as much as you want. 

(click here for a larger version)

Menu Bar
Without running any app (like Activity Monitor), you can easily see how much hard drive space remaining, how much RAM you’re using, how much of the CPU is in use (both Cores), system temperature, network usage (including BlueTooth), and it includes a nifty calendar.  You don’t have to activate all of these, only those you want.

Calendar
The calendar replacement is one of the reasons I installed iStat Menus in the first place.  It takes the standard OS X time/calendar and replaces it with an iCal interface.  Not only can you see the time and date right from the menu bar, but you can also expand it to include the entire month.  From there you can open up iCal.  Definitely an improvement from the stock system time.

Temperature
For anyone using a laptop, the temperature monitor is very useful.  From the menu bar you can see how hot your system is running at, but it also expands to include separate component temps.

An interesting side note: I never would have thought that wi-fi was the hottest thing running in my laptop.  As you can see, it’s at least 15 degrees hotter than the CPU.

Network
The second most useful menu is the network usage meter.  From the menu bar you can see how muchbandwidth you’re using (up and down).  This is useful not only to see if someone is stealing your wi-fi or if some app is calling home, but also to see if you’re being throttled.  (Interestingly, my semi-slow connection here in Springfield can always reach the peak of 10mbs.)

Expanding the menu lets you see peak bandwidth, current usage, Bluetooth connections, your ip address, and how much you’ve downloaded/uploaded.  I’ve yet to find a way to keep the meter beyond one session, so it only records network usage for essentially one day (unless I never shut my laptop down).  I would like to know how much I’ve downloaded over a longer period, like a month.

CPU
Arguably the geekiest menu is the CPU monitor.  I will admit to knowing next to nothing about this kind of stuff, but it’s a useful menu nonetheless.  From the menu bar you can see how well your processor is performing, including each core if you have a Dual Core Intel system.  Expanding the menu reveals usage percentages, a nice visual graph, the top five programs in terms of CPU usage, load averages, processes, etc.  You can even run Activity Monitor from here in order to stop whatever process is killing your CPU. 

Hard Drive
A less useful menu, although some may need it, is the hard drive monitor.  I don’t usually keep it in the menu bar, mainly because I already know how much hard drive space I have left.  Although, from the expanded menu you can see your read/write speed.  If you’re having some problems with a drive, this would be a useful diagnostic tool. 

RAM
Along with the CPU, the RAM menu is extremely important.  From the menu bar, you see a simple thermometer style meter that shows how much of your RAM is in use.   This in it itself provides a good indicator of whether you are doing too much and whether or not you need more RAM.  Since my meter tends to run high, it’s obvious my MacBook needs more memory.

From the expanded menu, you can see see the actual numbers, how much wired, inactive, active, and free RAM you have.  You can also see what apps are using up most of your memory, which in my case is Safari.  Again, from this menu you can quickly bring up Activity Monitor.

Conclusion
iStat Menus is a great piece of software, especially for the obsessive-compulsive types who have to know every little thing about their systems.  It allows you to look under the hood of your computer and see what’s actually going on in there.  I know there’s a myth that people who use Macs aren’t interested in this kind of stuff, but that’s just flat out wrong.