I’m a bit intrigued by the new detailed activity monitors and progress indicators in Windows 8 (copying files, the task monitor, network activity, etc.) It got me thinking: surely there must be some better alternatives to the built-in Activity Monitor.app?
“Better” as in more detailed and nicer graphs. Specifically, it would be interested and see percentage disk I/O (out of disk capacity), memory usage, and CPU usage in the same nice way as Windows 8 presents it.
The Building windows blog has an article detailing the new Task Manager in Windows 8.
I just think that OS X’s task manager — which I have always found superior — just doesn’t cut it anymore compared to what is coming in Windows 8.
Best Answer
iStat Menus and its free Dashboard widget version iStat Pro can show you a good broad overview of your Mac's systems, but I'm afraid I don't know of any monitoring utilities that show individual application processes (ie Finder activity copying files) other than shell tools like
lsofortop.edit I had forgotten about good old fseventer - last updated in 2010 but still working on 10.6.8.