When Apple moved along in its progression of operating systems, from Systems 6, 7, 8, & 9 to System 10 (OS X), there was one major improvement: On the occasion that an application would crash, it wouldn’t take down the entire system with it, causing a reboot!

In OS X, when an application “crashes”, it simply stops responding and usually “closes” or quits. You can then restart that application and continue where you left off. Sometimes, though, an application will stop responding, but will fail to “quit”. You may even get what is called the Spinning Beach Ball of Death, the rotating rainbow colored ball. This icon shows up when the computer is really busy or an application is locked-up. This is where a “force-quit” comes in handy.

There are several ways of dealing with stuck and hanging applications.

Use the “Force Quit…” menu item from the Apple menu.

• This brings up a dialog box, listing all active applications (Or, in this case, the in-active ones too). Just scroll through the list and select the one that is being stubborn, then click the “Force Quit” button. The troublesome application SHOULD close/quit. It sometimes takes a couple of tries to get it to work using this method.

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Lately, I’ve had quite a few discussions with clients about the shrinking empty space on their hard drive. Before they know it, they’re getting the “Your hard disk is full” message.

This isn’t too surprising because, if you are like me, you take bazillions of photos and rarely delete any. And as digital cameras are capable of higher and higher resolution, their file sizes are getting larger. (Let’s not even talk about all those songs in iTunes!) Your main hard drive contains the system files for Mac OS X and all the files for all the users. Eventually, even with the best of housekeeping, you will run out of space. At that point it makes sense to invest in an external hard drive, and do a little shuffling around of files to make room on the main drive.

Just about any external drive will work. The most common type has a USB 2.0 connection. Others have Firewire connections. For all around versatility, get one with dual connectivity — both USB 2 and Firewire. You’ll also find that they come in an ever increasing range of capacities — from small 160GB models to 1TB monsters. There are lots of choices. Get the biggest one you can find at the cheapest price! Personally, I have several of the MyBook series of drives by Western Digital.

Once you have your new external hard drive, you can make the move to transfer your entire iPhoto library to it. This will free up a sizeable amount of space on your main hard drive so you can, well… fill it back up again with something else.

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Do you dislike leaving your display(s) on when you leave your machine for an extended length of time? To turn them off, there are a number of options.

Utilizing the Energy Saver System Preferences panel, you can set a short sleep timeout; but, that gets annoying if you pause while working. You can also use Keychain Access (via its Preferences) to add a menu bar item that includes a Lock Screen function. Lastly, using the Exposé & Spaces System Preferences panel—in 10.4 and 10.5—you can set a corner of your screen to Sleep Display. Drag the mouse to that corner, wait a second, and your displays will sleep.

In 10.5, though, there’s a hidden method—one that’s easier than all the others, I think, and requires no use of the mouse or menus. Just press Shift-Control-Eject, and all attached displays will instantly go to sleep. Move your mouse or press a key on the keyboard, and the displays will awake. It doesn’t get much simpler than that!

Note that this is not a secure display sleep mode—if you’ve set your system to require a password on wake from sleep or screen saver, it will not be triggered if you’ve slept your displays in this manner. You can make it secure by first starting the screen saver (probably by using a hot corner defined in the Exposé & Spaces System Preferences panel), then pressing Shift-Control-Eject. The password dialog will appear when you press the hot key combo, but if you then click Cancel, the displays should then go to sleep (they did here in my testing, at any rate).

Again, this will only work in 10.5, and if you’re not using an Apple-provided keyboard, it may or may not work. Also (somewhat logically), if you’re using some type of program to prevent your Mac from sleeping, this trick won’t work—the screens will go black, but then instantly awaken.