Note to readers: This is actually last week's pick of the week, which I failed to get online before the end of the week! This week's Pick of the Week is Panther, but I'm not going to write about it, as the vast majority of the content here will refer to Panther for the next several weeks. So here's a week's worth of exposure for last week's pick...

The macosxhints Rating:

[Score: 10 out of 10]

• Developer: Raging Menace / [Product Page]
  
• Price: Free -- donations requested

I've been looking for a good system utilization tool for quite a while. I wanted something with an unobtrusive GUI that tracked things like memory usage, CPU utilization, and disk usage. A reference in a previous hint pointed me to MenuMeters, and it's exactly what I've been looking for. MenuMeters lives in the menubar, and tracks all sorts of details in many formats -- you can view data on CPU usage, disk usage, memory allocation, and network performance. Within each of those categories, you can usually choose one of several viewing methods (text, graph, pie chart, etc.), with a bunch of options for refresh rate, size, colors, etc.

Instead of explaining it, though, here's a 30-second clip of it in action on my machine while I did some stuff this morning -- click here (or on the image itself) to watch the movie.


The Tx/Rx data shows the data transmit/receive rates, the U:/F: is the Used and Free RAM, the green/red lights are disk reads and writes, and the two graphs are CPU utilization. These are just my settings, obviously -- MenuMeters has so much customization you can create just about anything you want.

If you're looking for a nice, unobtrusive system monitor that doesn't seem to suck up a ton of resources (either screen real estate or CPU!), check out MenuMeters.