My iMac froze on me

[Dobson73]

I was editing some photos tonight when suddenly my iMac just froze on me. iTunes was still playing but the screen was frozen in iPhoto. No cursor, no nothing. I had just been editing a lot of photos from a holiday so cropping and such.

On a PC I would have done CTRL + Alt + Delete but didn't know what to do on the Mac. Ended up having to hold in the power button to force shutdown and then restart.

Was that the right thing to do? Is there something else I should have done? I had Mail open, iTunes and Safari, no other programs.

 

[Corny]

Impossible. Every fanboi told me macs never crash. Must be true.

 

[luis34ct]

I have a Macbook Pro... when an application does not respond I press command + option + esc

 

[Dobson73]

Impossible. Every fanboi told me macs never crash. Must be true.

You're calling me a liar? I have better things to lie about and waste time on. This is/was a genuine issue. By the way, what you wrote makes no sense.

 

[andysayshi]

Hey mate!

Like all computers, Macs DO crash. Especially during really hot weather like we're having in Australia at the moment. (35 deg C in Sydney tomorrow!)

If an individual application crashes but the cursor is still active, like mentioned above hit Cmnd+Option+Esc, which will bring up a list of running applications. You can kill the dead one from this list. It's the equivalent of Ctrl-Alt-Del in Windows.

But if, like you said, your Mac has totally frozen (rare, but occasionally happens!) you did exactly the right thing. Just hold the power button down a few seconds until it shuts down, then restart it. You will probably get a little warning message saying that OS X didn't shut down correctly, then everything should be as it was.

Unless it happens repeatedly, it's nothing to worry about.

(In Corny's defense, I think he was just having a playful jab at Mac Fanboys - more likely people like me than yourself!

 

[D_Pipa]

Impossible. Every fanboi told me macs never crash. Must be true.

if there are no crash, your computer would be in seriously trouble. so all the computers especially mac does have the task menu for you to choose and kill the program which is good

 

[trawler69]

You're calling me a liar? I have better things to lie about and waste time on. This is/was a genuine issue. By the way, what you wrote makes no sense.

Don't pay any attention, it was his attempt at humour / irony. Yes they do crash but not very often and they will usually recover without a re-boot using one of the suggestions above.

 

[Kins123]

Mine on occasion does "freeze" although cursor works nothing else does. Can't switch applications, no dock animation etc. All I do is give it a minute and it will come back again. No idea what causes it... (And no it's not just an application that has stopped responding)

 

[techboywi]

You're calling me a liar? I have better things to lie about and waste time on. This is/was a genuine issue. By the way, what you wrote makes no sense.

No, he is not calling you a liar, it was a attempt at humor. Many Mac enthusiasts will say Macs are superior to PCs because of their stability. This was a attempt to dispute that. He meant no ill will toward you.

 

[Corny]

Thanks .. I thought that sarcasm was obvious

 

[watcha77]

I just hit the power button on the back. I've had a 3 or 4 freeze ups in about the last year.

 

[just_mills]

I just smack Ctrl+Q to quit the app.