Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
11.5
You can use Activity Monitor's Disk Activity tab to track how frequently the MacBook Air hard drive is reading and
writing data.
Spinning wait cursor is Apple's yawn-inducing name for the dreaded “busy” icon. Much more fun names for it are
spinning pizza and, my favorite, spinning beach ball of death (SBOD).
There's a lot of data here, but you need to monitor only two values:
Reads in/sec.
This tells you the number of times per second the hard drive is reading data.
Writes out/sec.
This tells you the number of times per second the hard drive is writing data.
These values should be 0 most of the time, but they do jump up occasionally when you use MacBook Air. If
you see these numbers jump up to any nonzero value and stay up for an extended period, you know that you
have a problem.
Checking for software updates
When Apple or a third-party software developer prepares an update to a program, new features, support for new
technologies, performance boosts, and security enhancements are often included. However, the vast majority of
items in a software update are fixes that squash bugs, provide more stability, and make the program more com-
patible with existing hardware.
In other words, if you're having consistent trouble with a program, chances are that other people have been hav-
ing the same problem, the software developers know about the problem, and they've taken steps to fix it. This
means that installing the most recent update for the application can be the cure you've been seeking.
You have three ways to check for software updates:
For Apple software.
Pull down the Apple menu and choose Software Update.
For App Store developers.
Open the App Store and click the Updates tab.
For other software developers.
Go to the company's website. First find your program's product page and
check out the latest version number. If it's later than the version you have, see if you're eligible for a free (or at
least cheap) upgrade. Otherwise, go to the site's support pages and look around to see if a patch or other update
is available for your application.
