Mac OS X Lion Pocket Guide

Utilities Included with Lion

What’s the difference between an application and a utility? It’s largely semantic. Utilities are a type of application. But in general, the ones called “applications” allow you to create and modify data, while the ones called “utilities” allow you to monitor and manage your Mac. There’s a reason Utilities is a subfolder of Applications and not the other way around: utilities are usually not as exciting as the applications you find in the rest of the Applications folder.

But that doesn’t mean the Utilities folder is full of arcane, boring stuff. There are plenty of useful applications inside. You’ll imagine great uses for a lot of them once you get a quick peek at what they do.

Activity Monitor

The main window of Activity Monitor gives you a list of all the processes running on your Mac (click a column heading to change how the list is sorted). You can view stats about CPU load, system memory, disk activity, disk usage, or your network using the buttons near the bottom of the window. Click on a process and then click the Inspect icon to get a closer look at the process. You can also use Activity Monitor to quit any process by selecting the process and clicking the Quit Process icon (very useful when a program is needlessly hogging the processor or is unresponsive).

Note

If Activity Monitor is running, it displays a constantly running graph of system usage in the Dock. You can control what data is being displayed by right-clicking on the Dock ...