HOW TO USE MAC OS X 10.4: CHECKING YOUR COMPUTER'S PERFORMANCE

The Activity Monitor utility enables you to view aspects of your computer's performance. Use the Activity Monitor to see what's happening within your computer's processor, hard disk, memory, and network: you can view how your CPU is working, how much memory is being used, how much storage space is being used, how well your computer is communicating with networks to which it's connected, and what programs (referred to as processes), are running on your computer. (Processes include applications you're running and system programs that you normally don't see and that run in the background.)

The Activity Monitor is useful if you're having some trouble with your computer's performance and you need to find out why this might be happening. For example, if your computer is running abnormally slowly, you can check the CPU usage to see if any processes (programs) are using an inordinately large percentage of your computer's processor. This could indicate that something may be wrong with the program you're running and that you may need to close it.

From the Finder, select Utilities from the Go menu.

From the Utilities window, double-click on Activity Monitor. The Activity Monitor window is displayed.

The Activity Monitor window will provide you with options for viewing processes (from drop-down list at the top of the window). The options at the bottom of the window (CPU, System Memory, Disk Activity, Disk Usage, and Network) will give you information about your computer's performance.

Select which subset of processes you want to view from the drop-down list at the top of the window.

Select an area of your computer's performance that you want to view.