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Hello, everyone and thank you for tuning to Inside Geek Canada. My name is Evan Theis and if you are like me, you probably have a second someone unhealthy fascination with statistics about your computer, like your hard drive speed, how hot your computer is and how much CPU you are using?
And if you are using OS10, I have the perfect application for you. Now, this application comes in three varieties, but it is essentially gives the same information. And that application is called iStat that is from a company called, iSlayer which is available at islayer.com and this program, basically gives you all the information you ever want about your Macintosh, including hard drive speed, CPU usage, memory usage and stuff like that. And, I am going to show you my two favorite varieties, which are called iStat menus, which basically sit up on the top menu bar, and the iStat widget, which is basically, is a widget and sits inside with the rest of your dashboard. So, let us go and take a look.
So, first I am going to talk about iStat menus. Istat menus, you can see actually right up in the top here, on the tab menu bar. And as you can see, it is already running and calibrating basically the all information you ever want to know.
First, we have the network usage, and since I am not online or not using the internet right now. There is no really network usage. The temperature is one o f my favorite tabs, as you can see all the temperature. And since I am on an iMac, everything is close to the same heat, because it is all in small area. But if you have a Mac Pro, you can monitor each specific hard drive, and see how hot there.
For the fans, you can see how many revolutions per minute they are doing. This includes obviously the CPU fan, KPU fan, things like that. How fast the hard drive is spinning, as well as optical drives, and it is just general power information.
The next type is the hard drive tab. Now, as you can see all the activity on the hard drive, including the read and write speeds. Now, I mind to update very quickly, so obviously, there are a lot of movement going; even there is no lot of activity going on, on the hard drive.
Next tab is the memory tab. Now this is great, as you can just see how much memory is being used and how much is free, which is quite useful if you are using really memory intensive program. You can see how much you have left. It also list specific program and tells you how much of the memory they are using. As you can see here, I am using; I show you the capture and that is so much I am using. And then I am using soundtrack pro to capture my audio. And that is so much of the memory that is using.
Next tab is probably the one of the most useful ones. This is the CPU tab. Now, this is great, because this can handle multiple courses. So once we do a core machine, but if you like four cores or even eight cores, it can monitor them all, and you can see their usage.
Now it tells me how much the user is using on this particular one. How much the system is using? How much if it is idle? And how much each of the application is using?
iStat menus are also has a customized both time and date function, which uses the iCal numbers, so you can see specifically what date is and the time.
Now, the great thing about iStat menus is it is highly customizable, but with that I mean you can change the color, you can change how quickly things update. I have everything updated as quickly as possible, but if you go through here, there are tons and tons of options for how you want things to be displayed. For temperature, for example, I have it in Celsius, because I live in Canada, but if you are in the states, you can go to Fahrenheit and you can monitor which items you want to keep the temperature on the fans and power. You are basically in control of how this menu is going to work.
Now, the second flavor that you can get for iStat, it is basically a dashboard widget, which is great if you just want to, you know it hop it once in while, instead of having always in your menu bar, in case you do not want to be always monitoring. But you can hop in; it has got pretty much the same features as you would see on the menus, CPU usage, memory usage, disk usage, network usage, Bluetooth which is also on the menu. I just had it disabled over there, variety of temperatures and fans speeds again. And, for this one as well, you can just tweak a lot of settings, they are not as customizable as the iStat menus, but there is quite a few things that you tweak here and what to display.
And, the last flavor would be the iStat application, which I personally do not use, just because I like both of these, kind of cover all the basis. I have the menus and the dashboard, whish I really do not need to staying on application, but it essentially does the same things.
So now, you have a few ideas on how to get more statistics from your Mac, whether that be using iStat menus or iStat pro. And these are all available from islayer.com.
And now, you can also find a variety of other widgets and gadgets for Vista. And they usually, these little parts of what iStat would be, you can just get a single CPU monitor, or something like that and as well they have also the other widgets.
Do you have any other flavor that I should know about or the software in general? But, tries to enhance this ability for people on the computer, whether that be with Mac OS10 or what windows?
Send me an email at evan@insidegeek.ca. And I will be happy to take those suggestions there, as well as just tech questions, I will answer them.
Hope this video has been useful to you and sees you online.
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