8. Monitor Your Mac’s Health

No matter how diligently you perform the maintenance tasks I recommend in this book, you won’t truly know how well (or how poorly) your Mac is running unless you make the effort to find out. The fact that no smoke is billowing from your SuperDrive is a good sign, of course, but it’s hardly definitive proof that all is well. In this chapter, I show you how to find out what’s going on under the hood.

Use Monitoring Utilities

Numerous utilities (most of them free) can provide up-to-the-minute vital statistics about your Mac. In most cases, these programs run in the background all the time, but if you prefer, you can run them manually when you get curious about your Mac’s current state. I provide a list of several such ...

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