What to do when Mac freezes up???

nellaselim wrote:
Hey i know that this doesn't happen often with my Mac, but when it does "freeze up" and that "rainbow colored wheel" shows up what can i do? In windows, i'd use Control-Alt-Delete, but i can't find what i do in Mac? Thanks for any help!

Welcome to the Apple boards:
You do essentially the same thing as in Winders.
Unless the entire computer is frozen (most likely not the case) click away from the stalled app and the pinwheel should turn back into a cursor.
Then click the little apple, top left and select "Force Quit"
The stuck app will show up in the window as "not responding" most likely and all you do is select it and it will die.

If the entire computer is frozen - a very rare event - hit the Option-Cmd-Eject keys and hold them for a second or so - this will put the computer to sleep. Then close the lid and wait a few minutes and open the lid and if necessary press a key. If that does not work, then you need to reboot by holding down the power key for a few seconds. This is very very rare with Macs, however,

Message was edited by: nerowolfe

There have been problems and bugs with USB hubs (keyboard, monitor included) that would render the system "inoperable" and not respond, not Force Quit, not Activity Monitor, nada, zilch.

A $2 USB or Firewire cable can bring a $4000 system to its knees.

Loss of communication with a disk drive is another, not from failure of the drive.

Copying 300GB to an external SATA drive and Spotlight will try to index the drive (freshly formatted, no data on it). (Please Spotlight, wait for I/O and system to be 'idle' and ask for permission to "add volume to Spotlight?").

Yes, rare, but they do exist.

Try restarting with 4 new "raw" drives and you get 4 "do you want to initialize" windows - those seem to lock up the Finder but usually if you wait long enough (couple or 3-4 minutes) you'll be fine. Not everyone, but I deal with a lot of disk drives and run into this one (disk mounting or arbitration).

{quote}In windows, i'd use Control-Alt-Delete, but i can't find what i do in Mac?{quote}

Option CMDESC is the keyboard shortcut to force quit an app on the mac.