Whaley’s Place

All of us geeky folks like to see what our machines are doing, right? Well for those with a Mac, I think I’ve got a winner for you.  iStat Menus. This set of utilities will allow you to monitor your machine realtime from the Mac menu bar. Not sure how it does with older Macs, but for Intel Based Macs it is a keeper! You’ll have to install the Intel drivers for your Mac to enable iStat to get fan speeds, temps and such. No worry in finding them though. You are prompted on install of the application to download and install them.

They’ve got a widget also with the same functionality, but I like being able to see the information right at the top of the screen.

Happy Monitoring!

Well, with the release of Windows 7, I really wanted to see how it would perform running in BootCamp 3.0 on my Mac Pro. I had already been running the release candidate in a VM and it ran fine…I guess the geek in me wants to see it stand alone. 

As I figured, it screamed on the hardware with 12 GB RAM and Dual 2.66 Ghz Xeon processors. I’m still going to run in it a VM though… It is just too much of a pain to reboot into one operating system and then into another.

OSX 10.6

Apple OS X - Snow Leopard

Well, I bit the bullet and bought Snow Leopard about a week ago and am pleased to say that I have had minimal issues. The only issue that really wasn’t was 1Passwd not supporting the 64-bit version of Safari. Other than that though, it saved me about 7 GB of disk space and performance does seem to be a little better. I’ve noticed some quirkiness with VNC and VMware Fusion, but both are still operable. Looking at things on their websites show that updated releases are forth coming.

Will post updates here as I experiment with it some. Take care and have a good night!

–Bill

First off, as far as OS search tools go…Apple did get Spotlight right this time around in Leopard. Well, I ended up corrupting some of the permissions on my drive and in the course of things broke Spotllight. After fixing the permission issues on my machine, I still had an incomplete index…. Here is how to rebuild the indexes…

1. Open System Preferences
2. Open Spotlight Prefs
3. Click the Privacy Tab
4. Click the + and add your drive to re-index
5. Wait about 30 seconds and then delete it from the Privacy list. This will force Spotlight to reindex the target drive again.

Spotlight index