Tip: Troubleshoot Mac problems with atPurpose Monitor

If you're looking to monitor your Mac's system resources, then your first thought will be to access the built-in Activity Monitor tool. It'll list all running processes, plus reveals the state of play with key hardware components, namely CPU, memory, disk activity and usage, and network traffic. That's fine and dandy for the average user, but what if you need more information -- or want more control over those running processes? The solution lies in the free system monitoring tool, atPurpose Monitor.

atPurpose Monitor lists everything Apple's own Activity Monitor does, but it does it better: processes are split off from hardware monitoring into their own dedicated window, while the Activity Viewer, which can sit in the menu bar or float on-screen, displays all of the key hardware information you need without having to switch tabs to view it all. It also displays the three most demanding system processes, letting you see which programs are currently hogging system resources, and it can be configured to display both CPU and GPU temperature too. Roll the mouse over the RAM entry, and you can flush the disk caches and reclaim physical RAM -- choose Purge RAM to do so.

The processes window displays the same information as found in Activity Monitor, plus a Priority tab, letting you see which processes are given priority over others. Select any item in this window, and information about that individual process is displayed above the list, helping you to identify unknown processes.

And having identified those processes, what next? Unlike Activity Monitor, which limits you to closing individual processes, atPurpose Monitor lets you go even further: pause processes temporarily, reveal their location on your hard disk and even adjust the priority level, allowing you to decide which processes should take the lion's share of available resources.

If all of this wasn't enough, you can switch on logging to monitor your system's performance over a period of time, create triggers -- that is set specific criteria at which point a script runs -- and launch a number of advanced system monitoring utilities. It all adds up to making atPurpose Monitor a vital tool in any troubleshooting kit.

atPurpose Monitor runs on Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) or later, and is freeware.