Freeware of the Moment- MenuMeters for the Mac
Our Freeware of the Moment is a Mac utility that solves a niggling problem that I have with OS X on the MacBook Pro. One of my pet peeves on a computer is having a hard disk activity light so I can tell when the disk is reading or writing. Most computers on the Windows side have such a light but the MacBook Pro is lacking one. The HP tc1100 Tablet PC didn’t have one either and I added a free utility to let me know when the hard drive is working so this is not a new peeve of mine. Dwight Silverman of TechBlog had the same complaint about his MacBook and a commenter on his blog mentioned a free program, MenuMeters, which adds not only a hard disk activity indicator, but optionally a network monitor, CPU monitor (including temperature) and memory monitor. The beauty of MenuMeters (besides being free) is it sits up in the system tray so it’s always visible and with all meters activated lets you know exactly what your system is doing. It’s highly configurable so you can turn off any of the meters you don’t want. I have them all active now but imagine I’ll eventually turn off everything but the hard disk meter. The program has a very light footprint on your system and is highly configurable through the System Preferences. Highly recommended. The program is actually donation-ware so if you like it slip the author some green.
What is the use of knowing whether your HD is working or not? I do understand that the less it works, the more you get battery, but it will anyway eventually read/write, doesn’t it?
Sometimes systems will appear to not be doing anything while working with the disk and I find it useful to know that.
I’m one of those geeks that has to always know what the various parts of my computer are doing. Is my CPU pegged? Am I using a lot of outbound network? What’s my temperature? etc.
I use an awesome little app called iPulse from IconFactory to see all of that graphically. It’s not free, but it only costs $13. I actually won an extra license of iPulse from them on Twitter during one of their Twitterific contests, so if you guys wanted to have it, or stage a giveaway or something, you’re welcome to it. I’ve been too lazy/swamped to blog one of my own.
I fell in love with iPulse long before I ever got a Mac. It was one of the cool Mac apps that I looked forward to running when the day came, and I even went so far as to design and use Samurize skins (a Windows performance meter app) that looked and worked like iPulse.
At any rate, you should a least check out the trial version, and give it a fair shake (it can take a little getting used to).