Computers Getting to know your Mac: System Profiler. One of the handiest tools in the Mac OS X arsenal is its self-identification tool, System Profiler. Here again is the About This Mac part of the System Information program. Note one of the ways to access the System Report. And here’s the System Report.
Apple System Profiler The Apple System Profiler (path: /Applications/Utilities/SystemProfiler) is a tool for browsing the hierarchy of components in yourcomputer, connected to your computer, and installed on your computer. A typicaluse of this utility is to provide detailed configuration information for errorreports to hardware and software manufacturers. Other uses include surveying theapplications that are installed, along with their version information, andchecking the status of USB or FireWire devices plugged in to your machine. The profiler collects information about your computer when initiallylaunched.
Information is divided into four major categories (labeled Contents):Hardware, Software, Network, and Logs, which are listed in a pane on the leftside of the window. In the initial display, Hardware is highlighted, providing an overview ofyour system hardware, as shown in.
The System Profiler collects and displays your system's hardwareconfiguration. Each of the categories can be expanded or collapsed by clicking thedisclosure arrow in front of the topic. Disclosure arrows are used extensivelythroughout the application, so be sure to click aroundyou'll besurprised at the total amount of available information. NOTE The View menu offers the capability to switch between three levels ofreported information (Short, Standard, and Extended). The information in thissection assumes that Extended (Command-3) is selected. Hardware Profile The Hardware category, displayed in, contains a summary of thebase computer. By expanding Hardware to show each of the subtopics, you can findeverything from the serial and sales order number assigned when your machine wasfirst built to the Vendor IDs of devices plugged in to your USB bus.
TIP To access the System Profile information quickly, you can run /usr/sbin/systemprofiler from the command line or open About this Macin the Apple menu and click the More Info button. For example, to see the internal disks and ATA storage devices, click the ATA(IDE) hardware category. The content area of the screen refreshes with a list ofdevices at the top and a detail view of the selected device at the bottom. Shows an example of this screen. View details of a given piece of hardware. If you're unfamiliar with the standard Macintosh bus types, this listmay provide some insight:. USBUniversal Serial Bus.
In its initial implementation (version 1),USB is a slow (12Mbps) bus used for connecting external peripherals such aslow-speed storage, scanners, printers, cameras, mice, and keyboards. USB 2.0,now included on new Macs, supports much faster speeds and can be much likeFireWire. FireWireAn Apple-developed bus technology that supports speeds of400Mbps and 800Mbps, hot-swappable devices such as high-speed storage, anddigital-video cameras. The FireWire bus is also known by its IEEE name 1394 andSony's iLink.
PCIPeripheral Component Interconnect. The PCI bus was developed byIntel (yes, that Intel) and is the standard for connecting internal video cards,sound cards, and so on. ATAIntegrated Drive Electronics. The IDE standard was developed byWestern Digital and is used for internal CD-ROM and disk storage.
SCSISmall Computer System Interface. A fast bus for high-speedstorage devices, typically used on server-class computers. Software Profile Selecting the Software profile category displays information about your MacOS X system configuration, including version, kernel, boot volume, and activeuser. You can use the three categories within Software to display extendedinformation about installed components of the OS. Applications The Applications selection scans your drive to display all the installedapplications (the BSD subsystem is not taken into account).
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You can viewversion, creator, and modification dates in the upper pane. Selecting an entryin the list displays details, including location in the bottom pane. Frameworks Selecting Frameworks displays a list of libraries installed on your computer,in a view identical to Applications. There are dozens of frameworks in the base installation of Mac OSXranging from AppleShare to Speech Recognition.
What Is a Framework? A framework is a collection of shared object libraries. Instead ofeach application reimplementing code, the operating system can provide commonlyused functions in the form of a shared library. Extensions Extensions, like frameworks, provide functionality to the operating system.Unlike frameworks, they work directly with the hardware to enable the operatingsystem to access devices such as network cards, sound cards, and othercomponents. Mac users are familiar with extensions.
In Mac OS 8 and 9,extensions had similar capabilities but often made the operating systemunstable. In Mac OS X, the traditional extension is replaced by a.kext(kernel extension).
These plug-ins for the Mach kernel cannot be installed byunprivileged users and are no longer appropriate for creating cool (butcrash-causing) additions to the system. The layout of the Extensions view is identical to that of the Frameworks. Network The Network category provides an overview of your installed networkconfigurations, their interface IDs, and IP addresses (if any), as shown in. Selecting a configuration displays additional information including MACaddress and subnet mask in the lower details pane.
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The Network category gives you a quick overview of your networkstatus. Logs Finally, the Logs category allows you to view the Mac OS X Console and Systemlog. This functionality is replicated in a number of locations, such as theConsole utility, so its inclusion here is a bit curious. Menus The menus provide little additional functionality beyond what can be accesseddirectly in the System Profiler window. The File menu operates on reports generated from the Profiler's data.You can use the regular Open command to open existing report files; use Save tosave reports in System Profiler, RTF, or plain text; and use the Print functionto print the report window. The View menu offers the option of switching between Short (Command-1),Standard (Command-2), and Extended (Command-3) report types. If you aren'tseeing a piece of information that should be displayed, switch to the Extendedreport.