Terrible, terrible blunder
I am a PC user, I bought my wife an iMac, since the world seems to think it is the best platform for ordinary simple folk.
She has been using it, mostly for email and downloading her photos from her camera, for about 2 years now (so out of any warranty or service agreement).
Thinking that the machine was a bit slow, she got a bee in her bonnet that it was the Time Machine slowing it down. So she asked me to get rid of some of the two years of backup. A quick search on the web made me come to the conclusion that it was not straightforward, and not safe, so I told her that it could not be done and that it was unlikely to have any effect on speed. She had already emptied trash, and that was about as far as I could go.
The Time Machine is using an external 2 x 512GB unit on a firewire port. The unit has two disks, one I named Studio 1, the other Studio 2. Time Machine was using just one of those, Studio 1, I think.
Deciding that she could do better than me, she dragged the Time Machine icon off the taskbar onto one of the Studio disks, possiblly Studio 2.
There is no way to check anything now, as since then, the iMac has been sitting with a twizzley busy thing twirling on the centre of a white screen and there seems to be nothing I can do about it.
Is there an equivalent to Ctrl+Alt+Del which would bring up the Task Manager on a PC, and I could then kill whatever process she has invoked?
It seems to me to be like putting a snake's tail in its mouth and the stupid snake is gradually eating itself up. It may be that it is creating a copy of all the time machine files? I do not know what effect dragging an icon has.
I have no idea about iMac's, and if I have to rebuild it, I am not sure how to start. Some help on that would be welcome.
If this were a question on a PC forum, it would bring down **** on my head, I hope there are some helpful souls here.... ;-)