iStat Menus

iStat Menus will put valuable resource information in your menu.  I only have it showing CPU, memory, and Bandwidth usage, but it also has the ability to show drive usage, temperatures, fan speeds, date and time with more in depth calendar, etc.

My iStat Menu configuration.
My iStat Menu configuration.

The configuration screen is pretty simple to decipher and you can check for updates from here as well.

Configuration screen in System Preferences.
Configuration screen in System Preferences.

Product Type: Freeware (donations accepted by developer).

Paragon NTFS for Mac OS X

Along the way I’m finding some useful utilities that help me better utilize my system how I want.  Because I have a 320GB drive and a 750GB drive, I partitioned the 320GB in half (150GB~ HFS+ for OSX and 150GB~ NTFS for Vista).  I will document how I formatted these volumes this way when I get around to doing the retail installation of OSX.

Anyways, I use the 750GB drive as a data/documents storage volume for both OSes formatted as NTFS.  I formatted it NTFS because out of the box OSX can view NTFS volumes but not write to them, whereas Windows can’t even view HFS+ volumes (out of the box).

Since you can already view NTFS volumes mounted on your desktop in OSX just as you would any other HFS+ volume, the only aspect left is writing to it.  Paragon NTFS for Mac OS X is a lightweight driver that allows you to write to NTFS formatted volumes within OSX just as you would a HFS+ volume, its seemless and doesn’t require launching of an application.

You can also use the included MacBrowser to read/write to your HFS+ formatted volumes while in Windows.

Product Type: Shareware $39.95 // Trial Period: 10 days fully functional.