SCO0109 - OS X Troubleshooting with Activity Monitor

So Macs don't crash that often (but let's face it they do sometimes!) but more often we may get a rogue application that decides to go AWOL and take up all of your precious CPU cycles. And let's not mention the "spinning wheel of doom" that occasionally appears if an application decides not to play nicely.

The good thing is that these occurrences don't happen that often but when they do, we need to be able to track down the culprit and stop the app so we can carry on working.

Step up to the mark, Activity Monitor.

Activity Monitor is a free Mac OS X application installed on every Mac and is just the job for seeking out misbehaving applications and some other really useful information. It even allows you to selectively quit individual processes that may be causing problems on you Mac.

This week's show gives you a run down on the major features of Activity Monitor and describes how you might use it to find out more about your Mac and to help sort out any process issues you may come across. Activity monitor also has a number of features and displays that enable you to continuously monitor the health of various aspects of your Mac via separate windows or even via the dock application.

If you want an alternative to Activity Monitor, this weeks show also has a quick demo of a super donationware package that lets you monitor many aspects of your macs health direct from the menubar. That's iStat Menus

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