Back when I had my very first computers, one feature they always had was a light that indicated disk activity. As the disk was written to or read from, a light would flash. I became very used to this light as an indicator of whether or not my computer was working hard. If it was, that might explain why it was acting sluggish.
Eventually computers stopped shipping with those hard drive activity lights. I guess manufacturers figured that machines got so fast it wasn’t worth showing that information. It’s also possible that it went the way of the oil pressure gauge in cars (my Subaru doesn’t even have a coolant temperature gauge). Either way, I missed that light. I like knowing what my computer is doing.
Fortunately there are ways to get that information, plus much more, and all displayed in a convenient way. When I was using Linux as my primary desktop I added in a number of menu bar widgets to monitor network traffic, memory usage, CPU temperature, and CPU clock speed. The menu bar in the version of Linux I was using is almost identical to the menu bar on OS X. Like in OS X, unless I had a full screen app, that menu was visible.
Now that I pretty much exclusively use my Macbook Air though, I was once again without a way to easily monitor system functions. About a month ago I decided enough was enough and went looking for a solution. I found exactly what I was looking for in iStat Menus 5.
This thing is really sweet. If there’s something your machine is doing, this app will let you monitor it. CPU temperature, fan speed (and fan speed control), detailed battery status, voltage at various sensors, network up/down traffic, detailed power consumption stats (Mavericks and Yosemite only), and so, so much more! It displays all this information in the menu bar so it’s available at a quick glance no matter what you’re doing. One thing I really like about it is the fact that it gives several different display options for each monitor widget. If you prefer to have your memory usage shown as a graph, you can do that. If you’d rather see it as a number showing free memory, you can have that too. If you’re not interested in showing the icon for CPU temperature at all, just remove it. The display is completely customizable. If you click on any of the menu bar widgets you get a huge amount of additional detail and graphs.
My favorite widgets to have are CPU temperature, network up/down activity and speed, load average, memory usage mini graph and HDD status. The battery widget is also worth checking out since it shows a lot more information than the default battery indicator like charge/discharge cycles and discharge graphs.
The app itself costs $18 for a single license and $25 for a family pack of 5. They have a 15 day trial which is what I used first to see if it could actually meet my (pretty demanding) needs. In an age of cheap $4.99 or $0.99 apps, $18 might seem like a lot, but after using iStat Menus for almost a month, I don’t think I could live without it. I would highly recommend giving it a try if you ever wished you had more information about what your computer was doing.