hello people of Mac Land...
i am kinda new to this awesome OS...
i need some guidance on using it in order to make myself as familiar as using Windoze...
i was wondering....
1 - is there anything equivalent to the task manager in Mac osx?
2 - how do i force kill a program?
3 - how to make my osx faster...it's fast now...but it lags in some areas...?

any answers...suggestions...recommendations are welcomes.
any other tips apart from the questions are also welcomed.
maybe this thread will be useful to all osx noobs like me.
and i thank u all in advance. =)

1. Activity Monitor - Located in Utilities
2. Force Quit - Click on the blue Apple on the top left corner, click on Force Quit and choose from there the app that you wanna kill
3. A little maintenance like running Disk Utilities - Repair Permissions located in Utilities. Perhaps you could be more exact as to where it lags. More RAM will solve most of it.

thx civic for the reply...
it usually lags when i m trying to run powerpc based app.
is this normal?
and to add more ram? i dun think its possible...i m running 2gb on mbp...

It is normal all right, cause non Universal applications runs under Rosetta. Nothing you can do about it but to wait for Universal version of the application.

When you run a PowerPC application , it has to use SSE3 , meaning that it will translate dynamically from AltiVec to SSE3 hooks , thus this takes lots of RAM and CPU usage. Plus the performance is not that great. I suggest you to try OSX 10.4.9 , if you have not updated it yet. Try to upgrade the software that you're using or find an alternative if there are no universal binary available for that software

1 use top - You'll got have to use Terminal for it - or use Activity Monitor . Activity Monitor even tells you if its Intel or PowerPC. Pretty handy , if you want to know if a particular software runs on Intel or PowerPC.

2. sudo killall <pid name>/<application name> - Terminal. If you're a GUI Style dude , you can use Force Quit - or press alt + mac key + escape to bring Windows Style Task Manager that allows you to force quit programs


3. Well get Oynx , and System Optimizer X for your system. It updates prebiding , fixes permissions and stuff like that to give some umph to your system. I encourage you to do get it. If you want , you could use the terminal to do it manually.

1 - is there anything equivalent to the task manager in Mac osx?
activity monitor

2 - how do i force kill a program?
cmd + alt + esc

3 - how to make my osx faster...it's fast now...but it lags in some areas...?
sometimes it depends on what you are doing & which application that you are using. But with 2gb ram installed , where do you find it slow ??

guys...thx for the feedback...
but i have one more question...
is there like an indicator where we can know if the hard disk is being read or busy?
like on a windows laptop..there's a hdd light that lights up when it's bz...is there anything like it for mac?
thanks.

Not there are not any for it...But you may want to try MenuMeters , {google for it} and install it. You can keep an eye on your memory usage , your HDD activity, your network activity and stuff like that

You can always use Activity Monitor and set the Dock icon to Disk Activity. You will see a disk write and read graph on the Dock icon.

Rosetta = Memory & Processor Drain lolzzz...
X11 also sucks up a lot of memory

I use Mainmenu as well for maintenance job on MAC!

dont forget to use disk utility to check ur hradisk regularly.. it helps for verify and repairs permission and problem on ur hraddisk...

thx people!
now my mbp is running faster than before...=D