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Apple's Activity Monitor is one of the most important troubleshooting tools for your Mac. It allows you to view all of the processes running on your machine and is invaluable when you have a rogue application or process affecting the performance of your Mac. In this tutorial, Don takes you through the updated interface of Activity Monitor and gives some basic guidance on monitoring and, when necessary, killing or terminating processes.

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.