MacMembraneThere are peels everywhere…

In my experience, OS X is an extremely stable platform, with system freezes or crashes rare and infrequent. But no platform is perfect, of course, and though the overall system seldom collapses, individual applications do from time to time crash and burn (thus making frequent saves of your open documents a prudent practice). As frustrating as having an application crash on you is, it is doubly so when the app doesn’t simply crash but rather freezes up and becomes stubbornly unresponsive. When this happens, you lose all mouse and keyboard access to menus and your cursor transforms into the ominous spinning rainbow that all Mac users are familiar with.

Fortunately, there is an easy way to force an application to quit even when you can’t access the command from the menu bar. First, bring any application to the front which is still working fine and click on the Apple menu in the far left of the menu bar. Select Force Quit from this menu and a floating window will appear where you can select the delinquent application and kill all its processes (unresponsive applications will have a red alert beside their name which you can’t miss). If, for whatever reason, you can’t select the Apple menu (this sometimes happens when Finder itself enters into some repeating loop labyrinth), just press Cmd + Opt + Esc and the Force Quit window will jump to the front. Force the culprit to quit or restart Finder and you’ll be up and running again.

A more troublesome situation is when a background application - that is, an application that doesn’t show up in the dock when running - begins to misbehave and eat up CPU cycles or becomes generally aggressive. This sometimes happens with menu bar applications and the force quit menu will be of no help to you in this case. Not to worry. Open up Activity Monitor (in Applications >> Utilities >> Activity Monitor). Here you’ll see a list of all the processes running on your Mac. If you know the name of the offender, start typing its name in the “Filter” field at the top right of the window and it should bubble up to the top and be highlighted in red. If you don’t know the reason why your fans began running in overdrive, click on the CPU process organizer at the top of the main pane. The most aggressive process will filter to the top and then you can force quit it by hitting the big quit button at the top left of the window.

The above two methods should take care of most situations when your Mac’s performance suddenly grinds to a crawl. If everything freezes up, then you’re left with no choice but to hold down the power button for a few seconds and force the system to reboot. I can’t imagine how this is good for your Mac, but fortunately you’ll need to resort to it only in the most extreme of situations.