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.

Invoke the Force Quit dialog by using the Command-Option-esc keyboad shortcut.

• This gives you the same dialog as using “Force Quit…” from the Apple menu; It’s just a little quicker for those who are used to using keyboard shortcuts.

Power User Tip! - To force quit the application without opening the force quit window, just press Shift with the other buttons (Command+Option+Shift+Esc) and hold for about 5 seconds. This will close the currently active application.

Right-click (or control-click) on the application’s Dock icon.

• This will bring up a contextual menu where you can select Force Quit. I think this method is the quickest approach.

In the case of really stubborn applications that simply refuse to respond to the previous methods of force-quitting, you’ll have to resort to methods that are a little more “techie”.

Use Activity Monitor to quit a stalled application.

• In your Applications > Utilities folder, there is an application called Activity Monitor. You can use it to, well… monitor activities (duh!). Anyway, launch Activity Monitor, and you’ll be presented with a list of Processes. A process is anything that is “running” on your computer. Some are “run” by the system; some are “run” by you, the user. Don’t worry about things in the list that you don’t recognize; just find the problematic application and select it. Then click the Quit Process button near the top-left of the window. Confirm by hitting ‘Return’ or by clicking the Quit button. The application should have quit, and will no longer be in the list of processes.

There is one final way to force quit applications. It is the least intuitive of the five; yet, it is still useful under certain circumstances.

Use Terminal to view and quit processes.

• Again, in your Applications > Utilities folder, there is a useful application called Terminal. Launch it. When presented with a prompt that shows your user name followed by a dollar sign, type “top” and hit ‘Return’. You’ll now see a list of all the processes that are active (you may want to drag the bottom-right corner of the window to see a larger view).

• You’ll see on the left of the table, a column labeled PID. That’s the Process ID of the corresponding process to the right. In THIS sample, iPhoto has a PID of 262. Now eprss the “Q” key to exit the Top command. Now what you want to do is KILL the process numbered 262, so type “kill 262″ in terminal and press the ‘Return’ key. The selected application should quit.