05-07-2011, 11:26 AM

When an application crashes on Windows, it's normally pretty simple to Ctrl-Shift-Esc, bring up the Task Manager and kill off the offending process. Is there a similar thing for OSX? Whenever Safari, iTunes etc crashes and locks the machine up, I'd like to be able to kill off just that process. What's the equivalent thing on Mac?

I understand you can ctrl-alt-click the Dock icon to force quit, but when the Dock won't pop up, the only thing I can do is hard power off the machine.

Admittedly, it does crash infrequently, but having to hard power off just because of one application crashing is ridiculous.

Thanks in advance. There's probably a silly simple answer to this question but I can't find it!

05-07-2011, 11:30 AM

option - command - escape

05-07-2011, 11:48 AM

Activity Monitor in your Utilities folder is the closest you'll get to Task Manager. But if you just need to kill one app, Cmd+Opt+Esc will bring up the Force Quit window so you can kill an app.

05-07-2011, 02:11 PM

I keep the activity monitor in the dock, just in case :-)

05-07-2011, 04:57 PM

Thanks - I didn't know about the cmd-option-esc shortcut. Looks like the thing I'm after!

Originally Posted by Stretch

Activity Monitor in your Utilities folder is the closest you'll get to Task Manager. But if you just need to kill one app, Cmd+Opt+Esc will bring up the Force Quit window so you can kill an app.

Unfortunately when an application in OSX crashes, it seems to lock up the machine completely so I can't open the Applications/Utilities menu from the dock, or anywhere.

05-07-2011, 05:05 PM

That is very rare. I never have an application crash lock the whole machine. Just ever once in a while like maybe a year or so and I run a lot of apps at the same time.

05-07-2011, 05:55 PM

Safari doesn't like pages with lots of large images...it'll happily bring the machine to a standstill. iTunes is on the whole pretty decent IMO, but every so often it'll lock up while trying to play certain lossless m4a files for some reason. Ripping them from the disc again seems to solve it.

Pretty sure it's a 'feature' of OSX as I'm already on my 2nd hard drive and I've reinstalled a couple times to solve various niggling software problems.

05-08-2011, 04:19 AM

There's no such thing as a lossless m4a file, not sure what you were going for there.

And yes, what dtravis7 said -- something's up with your setup, because freezes that lock up the whole machine just aren't supposed to be happening. I browse photography websites all the time with Safari (like Flickr, etc), large images never an issue.

Maybe you have a RAM issue there (as in "not enough of") or perhaps you're playing too close to the edge with a full hard drive. That's the only thing I can think of that would cause the kind of inelegant problems you describe.

05-08-2011, 04:45 AM

Originally Posted by chas_m

There's no such thing as a lossless m4a file, not sure what you were going for there.

And yes, what dtravis7 said -- something's up with your setup, because freezes that lock up the whole machine just aren't supposed to be happening. I browse photography websites all the time with Safari (like Flickr, etc), large images never an issue.

Maybe you have a RAM issue there (as in "not enough of") or perhaps you're playing too close to the edge with a full hard drive. That's the only thing I can think of that would cause the kind of inelegant problems you describe.

Sorry, there is such thing as a lossless M4A - I have 120gb of them.

Originally Posted by Wikipedia

Apple Lossless data is stored within an MP4 container with the filename extension .m4a

Apple Lossless - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
iTunes can't elegantly handle FLAC, so I convert to lossless audio in M4A container instead.


Anyway, thanks for the reply. It's generally very stable, but Safari has its moments. I've got 2gb of RAM and there's 30gb spare on the hard drive, so no risk or running out of pagefile there. It's had software problems in the past, mainly the "application Finder cannot be opened", followed by the spinning beachball of death. Reinstalling seems to have solved that though. Previous to that, I was having all sorts of strange file management issues...Quick Look crashing and constant freezing, which turned out to be a dying hard drive. With a shiny new hard drive, all seems to be good...most of the time!

There's no sign of repeating errors being thrown up in the Console, and Safari only seems to stumble on certain pages, mainly forum posts with lots of hi-res embedded photos. Another thing iTunes doesn't seem to like is if I edit the album art on more than about 50 songs...I just thought it's 'one of those things', so to speak!

Any advice would be much appreciated. Ah, and I've tried swapping out the RAM too, but that hasn't made a difference.

05-08-2011, 04:49 AM

You are correct on the Apple Lossless. It's extension is m4a.

OSX is VERY stable. I never have Safari freeze the whole machine. Not once I can remember in fact. If that is happening there, something is not right.

05-08-2011, 12:15 PM

Originally Posted by MunkeyQ

Safari doesn't like pages with lots of large images...it'll happily bring the machine to a standstill.

Safari has memory problems and will gladly eat up all available RAM. Odds are if you increase your RAM this problem will be less of an issue.

05-08-2011, 05:10 PM

I stand corrected on Apple Lossless' extension, thanks for pointing that out. I was thinking of course of MPEG4 audio which is as you know a lossy format.

As for the Safari issue, could it be that you're not ever quitting Safari? That also would cause the issue you're describing. As you probably know, clicking the red "close" button doesn't quit Safari (or most Mac applications, though Apple is a bit inconsistent on this).