iStat Menus 3.1

iStat Menus is a system monitoring tool for the Mac. It uses a comprehensive set of menus that let you monitor pretty much every aspect of your Mac.

When installed, iStat Menus places a set of menus in your menu bar (at the top of the screen). Some of those menus show graphs and others simply show numbers.

There are quite a few menus that get installed, and I can't possibly say all they do. The first one to the left, for example, shows 7 main categories when you click on it. If you don't click on it, it only shows the temperature of your system's CPU in real-time. Those categories are: Fan speed control, temperatures, hard drive temperatures, fans, voltages, current, and power. Each category shows different values for different components. For example, under "Temperature" you can see how hot your processor, hard drive, palm rests, and batteries are. The menu that I like the most is the network menu. This is incredibly useful to me. It displays all your current network information, like adapter used, connection time, bandwidth used, and all sorts of useful statistics.

In my testing, the menus installed with no problems and they seem to update in real time. You can choose what menus to show on the menu bar, if you think they all take too much space.