Quick Guidelines For Occasional Mac Freezes

The Beach Ball

The Beach Ball. The Wheel of Death. It has many names, but the dreaded spinning rainbow wheel, or the "spinning wait cursor", will only appear when a Mac freezes. While Macs are renowned for their reliability, even great machines sometimes get overrun by an errant application. However, when users take advantage of available tools, the freezing will only be temporary, and the Macintosh experience will resume.

Macs freeze when applications start to overrun available resources. Some applications, by their nature, simply gobble up resources. In other instances, applications may have a bug, causing them to swallow up processor and memory resources. When too many applications are running at the same time, or too many applications are utilizing the same disk, then problems may occur. Or, if the Mac has insufficient memory to support user demands, then the machine may freeze up.

Applications sometimes run away with themselves. In these cases, errant applications will need to be shut down, and the method used for shutdown will depend on the severity of the computer's slowness. Users may try manual shutdown via Activity Monitor or the Force Quit command, or may power down their computers as a last resort.

If the machine is semi-responsive, and menus are still appearing, Activity Monitor is the right choice. Users start by clicking on "Applications", then clicking on "Utilities", and then clicking on "Activity Monitor". The Activity Monitor will show how much processor capacity and memory each running application is using. To stop the errant program, highlight it, and then click the "Quit Process" button in the top left corner of the window.

Users will find the Force Quit command in the Apple menu. If the Apple menu is inaccessible, users may press Command-Alt-Escape. The main applications will show up on the Force Quit menu, although their resource usage will not be shown. On many occasions, users will see the words "not responding" next to the errant program. To end the program, users must use the cursor to highlight the program name, and then click "Force Quit".

When machines are completely non-responsive, users have no choice but to power down. Powering down is a solution of last resort, because, if the disk is being heavily used, then data may only be partially-written to the disk. Users should not pull out the power cord; instead, they should hold down the "Power" button for a few seconds. When the computer has been shut down for a few seconds, users may push "Power" again, to restart it.

Newer Macs have tremendous resources, so freezes will be rare. In most cases, when machines have more than one gig of memory, and are using a dual-core processor, then the problem has to do with the application, not the machine. However, users may have to upgrade, if they notice that shutting down programs speeds up the machine significantly.

While Macs are incredible machines, even they have problems from time to time. By utilizing Activity Monitor or Force Quit, users will be able to close applications that are using too many disk and processor resources. However, if the Mac freezes to the point that it is non-responsive, then the only option may be to power down and restart.

by: Tracy Narvaez

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