Jon Holato

I finally had a program freeze up on me just now; 6 days after getting my Macbook. At first I wasn’t sure what to do, I mean as a primarily Windows user up until this point I am used to hitting ctrl-alt-del and loading the task manager, selecting a task to delete, and waiting for Windows to actually carry out my request (which can take several minutes). Or in Linux am I used to loading up a terminal window and typing ‘top’ and selecting a pid (process id) to kill.

My first instinct, knowing that Mac OS X is fundamentally a Unix OS, was to load the terminal and try the same technique as on Linux. This didn’t work, however, as I later found out that this method only works on older versions of Mac OS X, before 10.3 (mine is 10.4.9).

The solution: a program called “Activity Monitor” found in Applications > Utilities. Using the Activity Monitor was very straightforward and efficient. Upon loading, it showed all of my current processes and highlighted in red was Safari with a “not responding” message. I simply clicked on the Safari process and selected the “Force Quit” button and the program was removed from my screen immediately. Quick, easy, safe, like everything else on my Macbook.

What caused Safari to freeze up you ask? Trying to make a new Yahoo Pipe. Go figure, my Google applications have yet to even hiccup.