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!

With a little more reading, I ran across this in Microsoft’s Knowledgebase: The article is for Windows Vista, but it applies to Windows 7 as well. Basically, Microsoft throttles network trafffic to give better network performance to Multimedia apps…i.e. streaming video, etc. Read the article and then make the twek as you see fit. I set mine to 70 with no issues. Very noticable network performance changes.  No reboot needed, but with Windows, it never hurts!

Before:

After:

Was doing some huge file transfers here on my home network (Windows 7 / Windows 2003 Server) and noticed that things were not as fast as I’d expect. When I installed Windows 7 on my wife’s Dell XPS 410, I didn’t do much tweaking with it. Well, in looking at what kind of throughput I was getting(Network Performance Monitor / DuMeter), it was what I’d expect on a 100MB Network. Being that I have Gigabit throughout the house I figured I’d do some looking. Moral of the story here…don’t settle with allowing your network adapter to Auto Negotiate! You’d think it would figure things out, but in this case it didn’t. See below to get a visual of what I’m talking about. Happy Networking!