Tired of searching for applications in a messy dock or having to launch Finder and wade around for the right file or application? A little used feature to most Mac newbies, (me included, until a few weeks ago), is OS X’s Spotlight. Spotlight does an awesome job at searching for files, but my biggest use for it is launching applications.

The first step to launching applications with Spotlight is to press command (the apple key) and the space bar at the same time. This will launch Spotlight, from there I type the first few letters of the application or file that I want to launch. For example, if I want to launch iCal I would type ic and then hit return to launch iCal. All that is needed is enough letters to distinguish the application. For example, typing ic will bring up iCal but if I wanted to launch iChat I would have to type ich.

Using Spotlight, I can access any application or file in a few seconds with a couple key strokes. Although Spotlight is great for launching applications it is not limited to just applications. Spotlight can find iCal calendar appointments, tasks, e-mail messages stored in Mail, and pretty much any other files that are in OS X. So, stop wasting time manually searching for files and applications and give spotlight a try.

Ever have the problem of Mac OS X running slowly and can’t seem to figure out why? For the first six months of using Mac OS X I used Activity Monitor when my computer was running slowly to find the program that was a resource hog and shut down the program overusing resources. Although Activity Monitor works perfectly well, I found a easier way to keep check on out of control programs with iStat menus. Using iStat menus I can keep track of my CPU, memory, hard drive activity, and network traffic from the menu bar. Additionally, iStat menus enables me to view specific details with just one click. I’m going to show how to install and configure iStat menus to show the most information in the smallest amount of space.

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In OS X the System Preferences pane is where most system and some application settings can be found. To get to the system preferences go to finder, navigate to the applications folder, and then launch system preferences.