Activity Monitor is the Mac's Task manager Migration between Windows and Mac users are casual occurrence, caused by variety of reason. Sometimes it's a difference between your own and work computers, sometimes decisions to change your home computers to try another operating system or manufacturer, etc. What is more, common problems after changing the platform are, that you can't find your well known features or application, but that doesn't mean they're not available.
Task manager is not an exception, a lot of Windows users who came into Mac world just can't find it. Task manager is well known like a monitor of your system, which allows you to spectate performance of your computer, applications and services that work in the background, resource consumption of each process and launch or close some of your services and process. So, you are probably wondering whether Macs have such a useful application. Luckily it does, just the name is different - it's called Activity Monitor. However, functions and the principles of operation are very similar to the Windows Task manager. Here we will show you the path and how to use Activity monitor which is equivalent to Task manager. Table of Contents:.
It is recommended to run a free scan with Spyhunter - a tool to detect malware and fix computer errors. You will need to purchase the full version to remove infections and eliminate computer errors. Usage of Activity Monitor on Mac To access Mac's resource monitor the path is a bit different if compared with Windows task manager, where you are able just to click Ctrl, Alt and Delete buttons in keyboard.
Mac Equivalent of Task Manager 1 – Forse Quit Applications This tool can be launched by pressing ⌘+Option(alt)+Escape shortcut. It is intended to quit applications, i.e. Something like Task Manager in Windows.
To launch activity monitor there is three actual ways. You can start your Mac's task manager by opening the finder and locating applications then Utilities and there you will find Activity monitor or just by searching in launchpad, also to use a Spotlight in order to quickly access from keyboard, which is probably the most comfortable way. Press Command and Spacebar at the same time, to bring up the Spotlight search field.
Type in Activity Monitor and hit Return button, when Activity Monitor populates in the Spotlight results Since Activity Monitor is really useful and has a lot of permissions, it will help you to sort task by CPU usage, and let you know who's taking most resource, also you can sort by other criterions like name, memory usage, process ID. It owns a search box where you can type the name of process and find it very easy to spectate it's statistics. What is more, Activity monitor not only displays list of applications together with their information, but also shows your computer's system level tasks, kernel tasks, processes that are launched from another accounts, literally all running process will be displayed. Killing or stopping a task/process via Activity Monitor Even the perfectly developed applications may crash due to various reasons and freeze. Closing or stopping a frozen app might be a little bit complicated task, so the easiest way is to use Activity monitor. To close your frozen application just find it in the list or use the search field, once you found it simply click on your frozen program or task and on the octagonal button with the x inside to close or force close. You will see a warning message and options to choose force quit, cancel or quit.
If your app is unresponsive you can click force quit, this will immediately kill that process and application will stop. Alternatively, an force quit option is available to access straight from your keyboard by clicking Command, Option and Escape keys at the same time which opens a Force Quit Applications Manager, where you will see a list of running programs and a force quit option. This is useful when you need to close frozen app without inspecting system parameters. Check your Mac system parameters Activity monitor displays information not only about your process, but also about your computer. In the bottom of window you are able to see CPU, Memory, Energy, Disk and Network loads and activities, by switching the tabs in top. Checking those stats will help you to troubleshoot who's responsible for your reduced performance of your Mac.
Short description what each tab displays:. The CPU pane shows how each process affects the processor activity. The Memory pane displays the amount of RAM used by each application. Choose Energy tab and you'll see the overall energy consumption together with the scheduled amounts for each process. In the Disk pane is displayed the amounts of data written and read throw your hard drive. Check the Network pane to find out which processes transfers the greatest amounts of data. If you prefer to see live system stats and activity, minimize the Activity monitor window, then right-click on icon in the Dock to enable various system activity monitors, which will show live graphs instead of standard app icon.
You can choose between CPU usage and history, network usage or disk activity monitors displayed instead of icon. Recommendation for new Mac users Until you get used to Spotlight and how their Mac works, we suggest to keep Activity Monitor pinned in your Dock for easy access. To keep an icon in Dock just right-click then choose Options and select Keep in Dock. Luckily you will seldom use Mac's task manager, since Mac OS and applications within it has a better performance than Windows, but it's always good to have fast access, in anything crashed. Usually the most common crashes are web browser's subprocess or plugin failures, like Java or Flash messing up and freezing an program or tab in the process.
Video Showing how to open and use Mac's task manager.
When an application crashes on Windows, it's normally pretty simple to Ctrl-Shift-Esc, bring up the Task Manager and kill off the offending process. Is there a similar thing for OSX? Whenever Safari, iTunes etc crashes and locks the machine up, I'd like to be able to kill off just that process. What's the equivalent thing on Mac? I understand you can ctrl-alt-click the Dock icon to force quit, but when the Dock won't pop up, the only thing I can do is hard power off the machine. Admittedly, it does crash infrequently, but having to hard power off just because of one application crashing is ridiculous.
Thanks in advance. There's probably a silly simple answer to this question but I can't find it!
There's no such thing as a lossless m4a file, not sure what you were going for there. And yes, what dtravis7 said - something's up with your setup, because freezes that lock up the whole machine just aren't supposed to be happening. I browse photography websites all the time with Safari (like Flickr, etc), large images never an issue. Maybe you have a RAM issue there (as in 'not enough of') or perhaps you're playing too close to the edge with a full hard drive.
That's the only thing I can think of that would cause the kind of inelegant problems you describe. There's no such thing as a lossless m4a file, not sure what you were going for there. And yes, what dtravis7 said - something's up with your setup, because freezes that lock up the whole machine just aren't supposed to be happening. I browse photography websites all the time with Safari (like Flickr, etc), large images never an issue.
Maybe you have a RAM issue there (as in 'not enough of') or perhaps you're playing too close to the edge with a full hard drive. That's the only thing I can think of that would cause the kind of inelegant problems you describe.Sorry, there is such thing as a lossless M4A - I have 120gb of them. Apple Lossless data is stored within an MP4 container with the filename extension.m4a iTunes can't elegantly handle FLAC, so I convert to lossless audio in M4A container instead. Anyway, thanks for the reply.
It's generally very stable, but Safari has its moments. I've got 2gb of RAM and there's 30gb spare on the hard drive, so no risk or running out of pagefile there. It's had software problems in the past, mainly the 'application Finder cannot be opened', followed by the spinning beachball of death. Reinstalling seems to have solved that though. Previous to that, I was having all sorts of strange file management issues.Quick Look crashing and constant freezing, which turned out to be a dying hard drive.
With a shiny new hard drive, all seems to be good.most of the time! There's no sign of repeating errors being thrown up in the Console, and Safari only seems to stumble on certain pages, mainly forum posts with lots of hi-res embedded photos. Another thing iTunes doesn't seem to like is if I edit the album art on more than about 50 songs.I just thought it's 'one of those things', so to speak!
Any advice would be much appreciated. Ah, and I've tried swapping out the RAM too, but that hasn't made a difference.
Comments are closed.
|
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |