iStat

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5O-MXWa-XQ8&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0]

Some people who have followed my other blog Good Night Geek before it turned into an iPhone app review blog may have seen my post about MenuMeters. I have found an even better alternative though. iStat menus is a form of one of my favorite dashboard widgets called iStat (download link at the bottom). This is in menu form, but unlike MenuMeters, gives you a lot more info, such as temperatures and fan speeds. Also for you multi-core users, there is a separate CPU meter for each core. Finally, some definition between two cores. Also, I can monitor things like how fast my fan is running (for me it’s usually about 2000 RPM). You can also see why your computer is making far more noise than it usually is. I know. I’ll take a good look at my iStat menus. Wow, my temperature is almost 100ºF (you can change it form F to C to K), and Wow, my fan is running 3 times faster than usual at a blasted 6200 RPM! Now I know. I have my primary temperature (the one that appears in the menubar) as the enclosure bottom, but I can have it configured so it shows the temperature of well, almost anything! The nice thing is that if you want to monitor multiple temperatures, just choose the most important one as the primary and to look at any of the temps, just click the temperature in the menubar. it will then give you details of everything in your computer that has a heat sensor including CPU(s), Heatsinks, batteries, and even the bottom of your computer (enclosure bottom). It groups fans and power together, so if you click on the fan speed in my case, I can see how many watts everything is using and how fast my fans are going. Click on my CPU info and I can see a lot of info about what is taking up the most CPU, uptime, and even a button to open activity monitor. There is much more you can put up there in many different ways, But I already have a lot of stuff in the menubar and that does not work good with photoshop because of how many menus it has.

BUT HOLD EVERYTHING!
Now you can even check it out on your iPhone or iPod touch! All you need to do is download iStat server (free!) and install the iStat app on your iPhone ($1.99). Then, open the iStat server on your mac. It will give you a passcode. Next, open the iStat app on your iPhone. If you are connected to wifi, just select your computer and type/tap in the passcode. Or, you can simply click add and type in the IP address of your computer. After that, tap your Mac in the menu and bam. You will see Fan, network, CPU, uptime, and everything else that you could see on the computer itself. This will be viewable from anywhere as long as your computer isn’t asleep/offline. What’s going on inside your mac-iStat menus and server.
iStat menus
iStat server and iPhone
iStat Dashboard widget

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