Another way to find information about the processor and memory in a Mac OS X Leopard or...

Another way to find information about the processor and memory in a Mac OS X Leopard or Snow Leopard computer is by using the Activity Monitor.

To open the Activity Monitor:

1. Ensure that Finder is active (if necessary, click Finder in the Dock).

2. Click Go in the menu bar and click Utilities.

3. Double-click Activity Monitor in the Utilities window.

4. Make sure the CPU button is selected to display CPU activity.

5. A small CPU meter is displayed for each CPU in the computer at the bottom of the Activity Monitor window so that you can follow the current CPU usage. Also, as you learned in Chapter 1, the upper portion of the window shows the amount of the CPU used (under the % CPU column) by each active program or process.

6. Click the System Memory button in the Activity Monitor window (see Figure 3-9).

7. The top portion of the window gives you information about the amount of RAM used by each program or process (shown under the Real Mem column) and the bottom portion of the window gives statistics about memory use.

8. In the menu bar click Activity Monitor and then click Quit Activity Monitor in the menu.

9. Close the Utilities window and any other open windows.