Measure the pulse of your Mac with Activity Monitor

Inside the Utilities folder is Activity Monitor; this can provide you with vital clues about what your Mac is doing. It can be key to understanding why your Mac is slowing down.

When you first open Activity Monitor in Mavericks you’ll see a window (right). Five tabs at the top of the window enable you to sort processes – all of the software that’s running on your computer – based on their impact on the CPU, the amount of memory they consume, their energy impact, how much disk activity they’re responsible for, and how much network activity they generate.

Many of the process names correspond to the apps you use on a regular basis, but those will only be a fraction of the processes listed. Activity Monitor keeps track of every single process that’s running on your Mac, including many that don’t have any sort of visual interface – the housekeeping programs that keep your Mac running.

If a process has failed or if it’s not working normally, that can slow your Mac down. You can quit a process from here. It will mark such apps in the list with ‘(Not Responding)’. To quit a stuck process, select it from the list and click the ‘x’ button . You can also hold down ç-åQ. If that fails to work, try again, only this time click the Force Quit button.

At the bottom of the Activity Monitor window is a graph that shows you the current state of whichever subject tab you have selected. This can be a handy way of figuring out if your Mac’s suffering difficulty that’s the result of a runaway process (if something’s taking up 100% of your Mac’s CPU). If the Memory Pressure graph is solid red, it means that your Mac’s RAM resources are depleted and the system is using your Mac’s drive for memory, which can slow things down.

If you’re running Mavericks, Apple’s added a new feature for laptop users that gives you a better sense of what apps are using excessive amounts of power. The battery gauge in your menu bar now has a ‘hall of shame’ – a list of apps that use significant amounts of energy. Selecting any of them from the list will automatically catapult you into Activity Monitor and open the Energy tab , which will show you how much of an impact the app is having on your Mac’s battery.