[cold aspiration]

I was looking at the activity monitor and there were some things that I have no idea i had that were running. I am running airport and safari right now but if I was just to quit all apps and just have airport on, what would be the minimum requirement for the os to still operate as usual? for example.. it says I am running Applespell and I've never seen that before.. I just don't want to click "quit process" on an important system file that needs to be operating in order for the os to work. thanks.

[Landos Mustache]

Why do you want to quit these apps? Do you have very very little ram and a slow computer?

[alphasubzero949]

AppleSpell is not an app.

[wataru]

OS X is UNIX-like, which means that many functions and features are handled by programs that run in the background called "daemons." Applespell is one of them. Without it, the built-in spell checker would not work.

If there's nothing wrong with your computer, then don't worry about what daemons are running. They're there for a reason.

[Catfish_Man]

Originally posted by cold aspiration:
I was looking at the activity monitor and there were some things that I have no idea i had that were running. I am running airport and safari right now but if I was just to quit all apps and just have airport on, what would be the minimum requirement for the os to still operate as usual? for example.. it says I am running Applespell and I've never seen that before.. I just don't want to click "quit process" on an important system file that needs to be operating in order for the os to work. thanks.

Applespell is the system spellchecker, WindowServer manages all the windows on screen, lookupd has something to do with networking, natd is also net related I think, Finder is the file browser, SystemUIServer handles the menubar, Dock (of course) is the dock, pbs handles copy and paste, ATSServer... I'm not sure. Something text related perhaps, loginwindow handles a logged in user, automount handles NFS mounting, etc...

So yeah, OSX is made of a ton of tiny little apps.

[cold aspiration]

^ ah I see thanks, I was just worried this might be the cause of the system getting hot very easily, even when its on a flat surface. after awhile i can feel the bottom of the desk where the computer is all warm! i'll try using the coolpad. thanks for the replies again, just trying to expand my knowledge of the os

[Catfish_Man]

Originally posted by cold aspiration:
^ ah I see thanks, I was just worried this might be the cause of the system getting hot very easily, even when its on a flat surface. after awhile i can feel the bottom of the desk where the computer is all warm! i'll try using the coolpad. thanks for the replies again, just trying to expand my knowledge of the os

The best way to see if they're the cause of the heat is to look at the % of the processor they're using, and check whether they're accessing the hard drive a lot. If they're doing either of those a lot they're heating things up. Otherwise, they really aren't.

[Brass]

Originally posted by Catfish_Man:
OSX is made of a ton of tiny little apps.

pedantic, I know, but the OS is made of may processes, not many applications. An application is a particular type of process (or group of processes) that the user interacts with explicitly and directly (usually through a GUI or through the command line).

A process is any CPU-utilising activity that is running on the system.

[Catfish_Man]

Originally posted by Brass:
pedantic, I know, but the OS is made of may processes, not many applications. An application is a particular type of process (or group of processes) that the user interacts with explicitly and directly (usually through a GUI or through the command line).

A process is any CPU-utilising activity that is running on the system.

Or one could say that the things actually taking up the CPU time are the threads in the processes, not the processes themselves, and you could probably keep going from there. Basically I'm just saying that for 99% of purposes "apps" is a fine descriptor for "stuff that runs on a computer". Also, a process doesn't necessarily use any CPU. It could be paged out and not even be using any physical ram except maybe for its entry in the process table. </annoying nitpicking>