Q: mIs there a way to see what background tasks are running on a Mac?
My hard drive is churning away, drastically slowing response time. All I'm trying to do is open a browser window. Time Machine is turned off.
iMac (20-inch Early 2008), OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.2)
Posted on Jun 6, 2015 6:38 PM
Launch the Activity Monitor application in any of the following ways:
☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)
☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.
☞ Open LaunchPad and start typing the name.
Select All Processes from the View menu, if not already selected, and also select the Disk tab.
Click the heading of the Bytes Read column in the process table to sort the entries by disk usage. You may have to click it twice to get the highest value at the top. What is it, and what is the process? Repeat with the Bytes Written column.
Posted on Jun 6, 2015 7:08 PM