Monitoring tools on your menubar
I used to use MenuMeters from Rage Menace. Basically, it shows various aspect of your computer on the menubar. It is very handy, for example, when the system slows down and you want to know what is hogging the CPU. But MenuMeters was released on January 2006, and looked a bit long in the tooth.
Then I came to know iStat menus. It is quite similar to MenuMeters, but it has more functions (like the ability to display date and time icon), and looks better. Now I set it to display CPU temperature and usage, HDD usage, Memory usage, Network activity (very handy way of checking if the Internet is working). Since it is free, I can’t think of any reason not to use it.
By the way, iSlayer, the maker of iStat menus, also makes iStat pro widget, which is also free.
