The Great Escape
So you’re caught in a jam. The Macs, you finally realize, are only 99.9% perfect and you’re trying desperately hard to figure out why the machine won’t cooperate. Here are a few quickies to try before going too deep.
1. The obvious: Quit the app and restart it. (don’t just close the window…do a full quit: COMMAND + Q)
2. If it’s a little rainbow wheel and you want to quit but can’t, press COMMAND, OPTION, and ESCAPE at the same time and force quit the app. If it won’t quit at first, do it again until it begs for mercy.
3. If that doesn’t work, try to put your Mac to sleep and wake it again. A lot of times this will jar it loose. COMMAND, OPTION, and EJECT will do this if the mouse is stuck.
4. If none of those work, just hold the power button down for 6 seconds for a full shutdown. You will likely lose your info by doing this, which is why it’s great to save your work as you go. So before you do a forced shutdown, press/hold COMMAND and then press TAB to cycle through your open apps and save anything open, such as a Pages document.
If you find this happening frequently, you either:
- Need more RAM,
- Have a hard drive that’s too full and cluttered, or
- Need to reinstall the Operating System
If none of those help, it’s time to upgrade your Mac. See my post on Dec 15 for help on that.
