Sluggish performance

I've been running a lot of simulations and plotting large amounts of data. This is making the performance really sluggish. Hangs a lot and I'm not always sure what is responsible. I would like to find an app that tells me what apps are using what, so I can decide if i want to close something. There were several ways to do this in linux, but I'm not sure how to do it on a mac.

Apple remote

I bought an apple remote which seems to work fine. It has limited functionality though. For example, I would like to be able to move the mouse cursor around and click on things from afar. I hear there is shareware that will increase the functionality of this, so I will have to look into it.

Projector problems

I tried to hook up my macbook to a dell projector and it just didn't work. I think the macbook recognized the projector, but the projector just kept saying "searching for signal". The adapter I was using works to hook up the macbook to a monitor just fine.

Time Machine Working... I think

Created disk image and copied over to the remote (backup) location.

Seems to be working- it's backing up now, but will take a long time the first go around.

Used the following posts:

http://74.125.47.132/search?q=cache:ZiA5l_H_OhEJ:www.macosxhints.com/article.php%3Fstory%3D20080420211034137+Time+machine+create+disk+image&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=7&gl=us&client=firefox-a

and

http://adamcohenrose.blogspot.com/2008/02/time-machine-wireless-backup-without.html.