As a hardcore Mac user, you can't just rely on putting your ear to the machine to hear how fast the CPU fan is spinning so you can form an idea of how solicited it is. What you need is a nice little free app such as MenuMeters. Luckily for PowerPC users, the latest version of the app adds PPC support.

Although this is not the only utility of its kind, it sure does its bit at showing plenty of details about the activity of your system's CPU, disk drives, network and memory.

The MenuMeters monitors are SystemUIServer plug-ins (also known as Menu Extras). As such, they can be reordered using command-drag and the program will remember their positions in the menubar when you login or restart.

The CPU Meter can display system load both as a total percentage or broken out as user and system time. The Disk Activity Meter displays disk activity to local disks on the system (anything that is an IOKit BlockStorage driver). The Net Meter displays network throughput as arrows, bytes per second and/or as a graph. Both the arrows and the graph are scaled using a user-selected scaling factor and calculation. Last, but not least, the Memory Meter can display current memory usage as either a pie chart, thermometer, history graph or as used/free totals.

For each indicator you get to specify how often you want it updated, the colors used for the graph, the icons and other settings. If you want more information than what MenuMeters shows in the menubar, just click on one of the indicators (CPU, Disk, Memory, Network) and let it drop down a menu with more comprehensiveness.

Version 1.3 of MenuMeters is a Universal binary, meaning it works for both PowerPC and Intel users. Swap file usage and encryption status (only for Tiger users) is another new addition based on patches from Michael Nordmeyer. Version 1.3 also sports an update load average calculation to better match 'top', patch by Michael Nordmeyer and a disk activity indicator with large color arrows on boot disk icon.

As far as bug fixes go, the latest version deals with a problem caused by Cisco VPN where the primary interface (the VPN connection) can't be found in the interface list. Also fixed is the problem for volumes with UTF8 characters in the name (generally iPods were the case here, the developer notes).

Click HERE to download MenuMeters 1.3.