by Windows users are used to having plenty of easy to access tools to show then what’s going under hte hood of their system. The Mac on the other hand has tools but requires some knowledge to get to these nuggets of information, such as knowing what process is sucking your processors dry etc.
Along comes adnx CheckUp For Mac: From their website.
CheckUp has been specifically designed to help you monitor the behavior and health of your Mac in a simple and straightforward manner. This is done in real time. No more needing to go ‘beneath the hood’ to find out all those technical details that could be affecting your system. We’ve done all the work for you!
CheckUp is able to detect common problems with a Mac and OS X, and will also provide useful tips to help you fix them. It’s as easy as looking at the dashboard of your car!
The touted minmal interface is a dock that sits on the right hand side of the screen with icons to view system information, cpu usage, hdd usage, processes running, networking and information.
Clicking one of these flies out a menu as in the above image to give you the relevant information. Nestled away under the hood is the alert system, taking this out of the realms of just being another skinned system resources monitor.
Especially handy is the process monitor that show;s you what applications are sucking resources. Ironically the Checkup Program itself uses about 20% of cpu time alone just to display the information on screen and did seem to introduce some lagg onto my system. Another oddity was that it seems to show that some apps used up to 142% of my cpu? How on earth is that possible.
Though you can view a myriad of things you can’t actually do anything in them other than setting an alert. The mac’s built in activity monitor will let you kill threads at least which would be nice to see here and this is where I feel the app has cross purposes.
Yes it takes away the technical element of viewing the all important system information showing you what could be wrong and warning you whats wrong with alerts yet it doesn’t let you do anything to help.
At 29 euro I still can’t help but have mixed feelings about this app. The whole simple interface thing to show you what you can see on your mac with built in tools throws me. It doesn’t appear to offer anything more than you can get if you know the OSX back end tools properly. For a program touted as being efficiently programmed on their website the freaky cpu usage makes it almost rival flash for heating up my mac book pro.
However, as a simple and intuitive system monitoring interface coupled with the ability to set alerts, there isn’t a lot out there for the Mac that will beat this.
App Info
Checkup for Mac is available from : adnx.
Cost 29.99 Euro
Pre Xslimmer 17.0mb
Post Xslimmer : 14mb
Version 3.0.4 is fixing all know issues. Go get it!