Mac n00b / Switcher Tip: Force Quit / Force Restart
Last night, I started watching a video that I had only partially downloaded. Since the file was incomplete, when Quicktime got to the "end," it froze. (I really should have used VLC). Spinning-beachball-of-death. Normally, this would be a simple matter of Force Quit.
In Windows, you would hit Control+Alt+DELETE to open up a dialog where you could choose the unresponding program from a list and attempt to force the program to quit. In Mac, you can do this in several different ways: You can hit Command (Apple key) + Option + Esc to pull up a window from which you can select the unresponsive program and click
"Force Quit." This is the method most analogous to the Windows' side of things. You can also click and hold on the frozen Application's icon in the Dock. When the contextual menu pops up, it will have the name of the program followed by "(Not Responding)" and the last item in the menu will be Force Quit. (Note: if there is no Not Responding message then the program may not be totally frozen, and you should just give it a few more minutes to complete whatever it is trying to do.)
Your third option for quitting the program would be to navigate to /Applications/Utilities/ and launch the Activity Monitor. Here you can view Active Processes, select the one that is frozen, and click the Quit Process button.
Unfortunately, last night I was watching the video at full screen, so I couldn't navigate out of the program to get any of the above methods to work. I had to force the computer to reboot. To do this, you simply hit CTRL +
COMMAND (Apple Key) + Your Mac's Power button. Some Macs may actually have a reset button you can use. If none of this works, as a last result, you can hold down the power button on your Mac for about 10 seconds, which will force the computer to cut current. This method is not quite as bad as unplugging your computer, but pretty close,
so only do it when you absolutely must.
UPDATE: Matt Green adds, "You can force quit the currently focused app from the keyboard too.
Command+Option+Shift+Escape kills the current app without needing to bring up the Force Quit window or dock. Handy for fullscreen Quicktime movies that hang." Thanks, Matt! That one always slips my mind.