ctrl alt del equivalent on a mac

What is the the equivalent? I am finding different combinations on mysearches but want to know the right one.

thank you

Alt+Cmd+esc

The amount of times I've had to use this in the almost 5 years of owning my MacBook pro can be counted on two hands.


Doug

If I understand your question correctly...and you want to force quit an application...then you use "Command + Option + Escape".

Mac OS X: How to quit an unresponsive application using Force Quit

- Nick

Something hung up in safari and the computer just froze, I had to press the power button down several times in various increments of time and it finally went off.

I am looking for the command to shutdown the computer when it is in this state.

Yes this is the first time this has happened and I have had it for 6.5 months.

Alt cmd esc is the order ? The alt is at the top of the option key so do I have to press the fn key as well?

Just press all 3 at the same time and it will bring up the force quit menu.

pcc said:

I am looking for the command to shutdown the computer when it is in this state.

Alt cmd esc is the order ? The alt is at the top of the option key so do I have to press the fn key as well?

Click to expand...

The "Alt" key and the "Option" key on Macintosh keyboards is the same key. As I posted earlier..."Command + Option + Escape" will bring up the force quit menu (as "dtravis7" mentioned)...then you choose the application you want to force quit.

If you really just want to shut the whole computer down...just press and hold down the power button until the computer shuts off (this should be your last resort).

- Nick

The actual time required for the forced total shutdown (by holding the power key) is four seconds, for the record.

But this should only be used as an ABSOLUTE last resort, as you may corrupt the directory or lose data doing this.

Thank you for the information.

If you can launch Activity Monitor sometimes it will force a program to quit when nothing else works. Try that before using the power button. This article should explain things better. If you are already familiar with Activity Monitor skip to the section "What Can I Do With All That Information?"

Because Macs sleep and wake up so easily, many Mac users (especially laptop users) tend to never reboot the machine.* Be sure once in a while, perhaps once a week you reboot the machine. That will help free up memory and speed up your machine and help it run cleaner. Especially any time you notice something 'funky' going on or have a program crash - it might be good to reboot, just to have a fresh run at things, as some memory might have gotten tied up in the crash.

Note: one of the stupid ideas Apple had with the introduction of Lion was restarting where you left off - not only will all your apps re-open, but any errors that were present will be as well, so be sure to NOT check the box that says "Reopen windows when logging back in" - that is the worst thing you can do.

A reboot a week is wise. Or at least every other week.

*The other extreme are new Mac users who shut down and reboot every time they leave their computer - which is unnecessary with a Mac! Relax, they are very stable.