Force Quitting Applications

Occasionally, an application may freeze, lock up, or otherwise become unresponsive. When this happens, you can no longer work with that application or its documents. Sometimes, you can't access any application at all!

The Force Quit command (Figure 47) enables you to force an unresponsive application to quit. Then you can either restart it or continue working with other applications.

Figure 47. Choose Force Quit from the Apple menu.

Warning!

• When you use the Force Quit command to quit an application, any unsaved changes in that application's open documents may be lost. Use the Force Quit command only as a last resort, when the application's Quit command cannot be used.

Tips

• Mac OS X's protected memory, which is discussed at the beginning of this chapter, makes it possible for applications to continue running properly on your computer when one application locks up.

• If more than one application experiences problems during a work session, you might find it helpful to restart your computer. This clears out RAM and forces your computer to reload all applications and documents into memory. You can learn more about troubleshooting Mac OS X in Chapter 23.

To force quit an application

1.	Choose Apple > Force Quit (Figure 47), or press .
2.	In the Force Quit Applications window that appears (Figure 48), select the application you want to force to quit. Figure 48. Select the application you want to force to quit.
3.	Click Force Quit.
4.	A confirmation dialog like the one in Figure 49 appears. Click Force Quit. Figure 49. Use this dialog to confirm that you really do want to force quit the application. The application immediately quits.

Tip

• If you selected Finder in step 2, the button to click in step 3 is labeled Relaunch.