Select your user account from the sidebar, and then click the Login Items tab. Launch System Preferences, and select the Users & Groups preference pane. Tip: To have Activity Monitor automatically start up at login but leave the Activity Window closed so it doesn’t clutter up your desktop, do the following: The Activity Monitor app will now open automatically whenever you start up your Mac. To have Activity Monitor automatically launch whenever you start your Mac up, right-click the Activity Monitor dock icon and select Options, Open at Login. The Activity Monitor window will open, and its icon will be added to the Dock. Launch Activity Monitor, located at /Applications/Utilities. You can start Activity Monitor up when you have a specific need to troubleshoot issues or check on performance, or you can launch Activity Monitor as part of the startup process for your Mac. You can configure always-on-top monitor windows, such as CPU History, to track your Mac’s resources. You can think of the app as letting you see what’s going on behind your Mac’s desktop.

You can kill or quit a process that may be causing problems, such as a frozen app or one that’s hogging significant resources.Īctivity Monitor also lets you see how each process or app is affecting your Mac’s CPU, RAM, energy, disk, and network usage. Both allow you to see which apps and processes are currently running.

Some consider Activity Monitor to be similar to Windows Task Manager. What is Activity Monitor?Īt its heart, the Activity Monitor app is designed to show all the processes that are running on your Mac and how those processes are affecting your Mac’s hardware.

In part 1 of this Rocket Yard guide, we’ll look at using Activity Monitor to gauge the performance of the Mac’s processors and memory systems. That’s just one of many informational graphs Activity Monitor can generate you may find one of the other Dock views a better fit for your needs. It sits in my Dock and displays a small graph showing CPU performance over time. It can be such a useful app that I have it set to start automatically whenever I start up my Mac.

How to check mac cpu speed