Posted on Wednesday 26 October 2005 - Popularity: unranked
I show you a lot of different apps over here, some of them are not even final products and bugs I didn’t experience can easily make trouble on your differently configured system, especially if the app installs background processes you don’t see with “alt apple esc”. Here’s a small tip that I hope will be able to help you out if something goes wrong:
If you open the Terminal app and run the command top, you get a list of all currently running processes on your machine, how much memory they’ve taken and their CPU load. Shown are processes of currently running applications and background processes. While it isn’t to hard to find out what a process like “Adobe Phot”, “iTunes” or “firefox-bi” is, there are a lot of Unix background processes that aren’t as easy to identify.
Now how do you find out what such a background process does? Gordon Davisson made a great list of background processes that can help you to identify such a background process that makes trouble. The list is far from complete, so there’s always the chance that the trouble making process isn’t listed, but it’s still better than nothing and often a Google search can give you additional hints.
Before you start to play around with commands on the Terminal you’re not used to, there’s an app already on your disk to make this task a lot easier. Activity Monitor, found in the “Utilities” folder, let’s you easily inspect and quit a process. However, before you go wild with killing processes that seam to have an unusual high CPU load, if it’s a process you don’t have an idea what it does, always have in mind that some processes are needed by the system to work properly, so always try to find out what exactly they do before you shoot them down.
Fredi
