When our Mac becomes unresponsive, or weird things start happening with our peripherals, it may be time to force-quit some of our programs and applications.įirst things, first - try to close out any and every program that you are not using.

Keep your computer powered down completely for a few minutes (ideally 2-3) before trying to power on, again. Hold the power button/TouchPad down until you can hear your Mac power off. If you cannot even pull up a menu of options by holding the power button/TouchPad, then you'll have to go for the last resort. You will lose your data, but you will be able to start fresh when the computer powers back up. This time, you may need to click on the Restart or the Shut Down options. However, if that doesn't fix the frozen situation, repeat the 1.5-second power button/Touchpad hold down method until the dialog box appears, again. If this works, you will not lose any unsaved data. If you can pull up this dialog box, that may have been all you needed to get your Mac out of its frozen state. If you hold the power button/TouchPad for a little more than a second, you should see the pop-up window appear giving you these options: Restart, Sleep, Cancel, Shutdown.Ĭlick on Cancel, first. One small, flush with our keyboard, a button can offer salvation when our machines go rogue.ĭepending on the make and model of your Mac, you'll have a power button or a TouchPad that controls your computer. When applications become a bit unresponsive, sometimes your Mac just needs a time out. Macs have a pretty robust ability to fix themselves. Here are a few strategies for how to force quit, force shutdown, and force restart an unresponsive Mac. These situations are a few of the first signs that your computer is working overtime. You'll notice that the mouse is not tracking exactly, and you'll probably witness a few programs close unexpectedly.

When one, or a few, of these issues, is affecting your computer, you'll find that your Mac's response time is slower than usual.

One of our peripherals is causing the lag (check anything/everything extra plugged into your machine).

We've downloaded way too many programs that run at startup.

Here are a few of the main reasons why our Macs begin to lag and cause our computers to become unresponsive: Although we rarely see this happen, there is such a thing as too much for our computers to handle. However, there is a limit to even the hardiest of Mac products. We are very accustomed to multitasking with a multitude of apps and programs running on our machines simultaneously. Part 1: Why My Mac Won't Shut Down or RestartĮvery Mac user tends to get a bit greedy. If you are ever faced with a situation where you need to force quit or force restart your Mac, here are a few helpful tips. They will need a few force quit restarts. But, they do begin to lag they do begin to get tired and overworked. Most Macs will last us longer than we could have ever imagined. Help! Everything is frozen, and I don't think I saved my work before this happened! I couldn't right-click on the application to Force Quit, either. I could not use the Control+Option+Delete to force quit any of my applications. When I was working on my grad school assignment, my computer froze.

We think the inevitable questions: Is this the end? Do I even know how to force quit a Mac to try and start over? Q: How do I force quit a Mac when it freezes? We fear for everything on our hard drive that hasn't been backed up to the cloud. When the computer totally freezes, or worse, goes black - we stop breathing. However, when we see the spinning rainbow wheel of doom last for longer than a few seconds, we can feel our heart rate begin to speed. We shell out a good amount of money for these machines because we know they are worth every last cent. They are one of the absolute best computers for design and function, at least in our opinions as Mac users. They are almost completely immune to viruses. We decide to buy a Mac for several reasons.

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