We’ve all been there. Sometimes you’re using your Mac quite happily and suddenly things come grinding to a halt as an errant application begins to suck up resources and hangs or freezes your activities. Typically, you’ll notice things start to slow down, the hard drive might become noisy, and you’ll keep seeing the “spinning wait cursor” (its official name, but commonly known as the “beach ball” or “wheel of death” - pictured above.)

First, Why Does Your Mac Hang and Slow Down Anyway?

The most common reasons for your Mac freezing / hanging and slowing down are:

• An application has a bug that is causing it to consume too many resources
• An application is legitimately resource intensive and your computer is slow
• Your Mac has too little memory for your demands
• Too many applications are running at the same time
• You have multiple applications all trying to use the disk at the same time

If you have a reasonably modern Mac and you have less than a handful of applications open, it’s unlikely your problem is due to lack of resources, since modern Macs come with quite a lot of memory and incredibly powerful CPUs. If you have more than 1 gigabyte of memory and any dual-core processor, and you’re not trying to render movies at the same time as ripping DVDs and downloading from the Internet, resource demands are unlikely to be your problem. If shutting down applications and doing less things at a time does solve your problem, then your computer is likely to need an upgrade of some sort.

Instead, and this is quite common, you probably have an application that has encountered a bug or has otherwise “run away with itself” and which needs to be shut down. Applications are not perfect and there are many cases where they can become errant and require manual shutdown. How you shut down errant applications depends on how slow your computer is running.

Activity Monitor: The Best Option If You Can Just About Use The Machine

If your machine is semi-responsive and you’re able to click on menus and have them appear within a few seconds, the best option is to run Apple’s own “Activity Monitor” to find out what application is causing you problems. You can launch Activity Monitor following the instructions in our “How to Launch Any Program Quickly” article, or by navigating through your hard drive to “Applications” then to “Utilities” and then double click on “Activity Monitor” (seen below):

Once Activity Monitor is running, it looks like this:

Activity Monitor is designed to show you what resources running applications are using. It shows the processor usage under the “CPU” column, the application name under “Process Name” and the amount of memory used under the “RSIZE” column. You can click on the column headers to sort the columns by their values, so it’s easy to find out which application is using the most CPU or memory (the two biggest culprits for a slow Mac.) Just click on the CPU heading until the higher numbers at the top, and you can see what process is running amok!

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Tip: If Activity Monitor loads but does not display a window like the above, try pressing Cmd+1 on your keyboard to bring up the window shown in the screenshot.

To kill a process, just click on its row in the Activity Monitor, then click the “Quit Process” icon at the far top left. You may need to do this a few times if the application fails to quit. If all goes well, your Mac should become more responsive (unless you have more applications you need to quit - just keep an eye on the numbers!)

Force Quit: For When Things Get REALLY Slow

If your machine is not responsive enough to run Activity Monitor, yet your machine is not 100% “locked up” then Force Quit is the best port of call. Force Quit is a simple menu provided by OS X that lets you shut down applications with a single click. To bring up Force Quit just press Cmd + Alt + Escape (a.k.a. Cmd + Option + Escape) on your keyboard where Cmd + Alt are next to your space bar, and Escape (written as “Esc” on most keyboards) is at the top left. When pressed, Force Quit should appear reasonably quickly:

Force Quit does not show all of the various processes running on your machine but just shows the main applications. To “kill” one, just click on its name and then click “Force Quit.” You can repeat this over and over if it does not work the first time, and you can also work your way through all of the applications if you are not sure which one is causing the trouble. If you do kill all your applications, however, it is a good idea to restart your machine afterwards in order to get a clean start.

Power Down: The Last Resort

If your machine is so unresponsive that Force Quit doesn’t even come up, you may need to power down your machine mid-flow. This is not a desirable course of action but may be all you can do.

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WARNING: Powering down a machine without going through a true shutdown or restart process has the potential to cause problems, particularly if the hard drive is in heavy use, as data may only get half-written to disk. MacYay takes no responsibility for anything that occurs if you power down your machine in this way. That said, in the several times I’ve done this in the last few years, no bad effects have occurred, as computers nowadays are a lot more resilient to this sort of activity than they were in the past!

To power down your machine, the best option is to HOLD DOWN the power (on/off) button for several seconds. Do not just pull the mains cable / cord out of your Mac! Instead, just hold down the button you use to ordinarily turn on the machine from a cold start. Once the screen goes black and the machine is quiet, your machine is off. Wait several seconds before restarting your machine.

Declutter Your Dock To The Max!

My dock now only contains the icons of programs that are actually running, much like Windows’ Taskbar, along with a couple of “stacks” and the Trash. This reduces clutter and makes life a lot easier. Your dock can be the same if you follow this advice.

Two Keys And You’re Away!

All you need to press to get going is Command and Space (see above). Make sure you press Command before Space. You can press these at any time while using your Mac to open the Spotlight search bar at the top of your screen:

Once the spotlight bar is open, just start typing the name of the application you want to run. For example, let’s start to type “calculator” (without the quotes!) After typing just one letter, I already have Calculator selected and showing as the top application!

Now just press the Enter key and Calculator will be launched.

More Advanced Scenarios

For most applications, it is not going to be the case that they will appear with just a single keypress. After all, you’re likely to have more than 26 applications on your computer, and other types of document might even pop up first instead of applications! As such, you need to make sure the thing that’s highlighted as the “Top Hit” is actually what you want to run. If it’s not, keep typing more of the name of the application you want to run. So if Calculator doesn’t appear when you press “c,” keep typing the rest of the word.. a l c u l.. and so on, until Calculator appears!

In rare cases you might type the name of an application and still not have it selected. If so, it’s likely the application will be showing on the menu anyway, but not be selected. If this is the case, just use the up and down arrow keys to select what you want and then press Enter.

Eventually these actions will become second nature, even if they initially seem slow, as Spotlight is clever enough to get a feel for what you are searching for and will improve its results as time goes by. Once proficient, you’ll be able to launch applications far quicker than by using the mouse and have a clean dock!

Taking screenshots is a good way to get your point across or show something to someone else. Some people download whole screenshot applications to do the job, but there’s a three key shortcut, shown in the image above! I use this technique myself to get all of the images you see in this blog.

To start the short-cut process, just press:

Cmd & Shift & 4

When you press these keys all at once, you don’t immediately get a screenshot. Your mouse pointer changes to a crosshair (+) and you need to click and drag the area you want to take a screenshot of:

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Tip
Make sure to hold the mouse button down while dragging out the area, otherwise it won’t work!

While you are dragging, you’ll notice the size of the screenshot appears next to the cursor at all times. This can be useful if you need to make the screenshot a particular size. It can even be useful as a quick and easy way of measuring things that are you on your screen (you can always delete the resulting screenshot!)

Once you let go of the mouse button, the screenshot is written to your desktop as a PNG file. This can be used directly on Web pages or sent via e-mail, or you can load it into Preview to convert it to other formats (such as JPEG or GIF).

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Tip
To cancel taking a screenshot, press escape while the crosshair cursor is visible

By default, the OS X Dock is located in the middle of either the bottom or the sides of the screen. It can, however, be pinned to one of the “corners.” For example, in the screenshot above, the dock is located on the right but pinned to the bottom.

The dock works fine when pinned to either the top / bottom / left / right and it only takes two lines at the Terminal to achieve.

Run the Terminal Application

Go to the Spotlight icon in the top right of the screen and search for “terminal”. You can then click on the “Terminal” application to run it.

By default, the dock is pinned to the “middle” of either the bottom or the side (wherever you choose to have your Dock), but you can also pin it to the “start” or the “end.” If your dock is on the bottom of the screen, the start is at left, the end is at the right. If your dock is on the side of the screen, the start is at the top, the end is at the bottom (in the first screenshot in this article, the dock is on the right of the screen and pinned to the “end.”)

Change The Setting

To pin the dock to the start, use: defaults write com.apple.dock pinning -string start

To pin the dock to the end, use: defaults write com.apple.dock pinning -string end

To return the dock to the middle, use: defaults write com.apple.dock pinning -string middle

“Restart” the Dock

Once the setting has been changed, you need to run: killall Dock

This command restarts the program that displays the Dock on the screen. It can take a few seconds to refresh, but once it’s up again, it should now be pinned to the corner!

To close the Terminal application once you’re done, type exit and press Enter, or press Cmd+Q.

The Target: Printer Drivers!

What, you may ask, is using 3 gigabytes of space yet has no use to us? Here’s the culprit:

Licensed under Creative Commons. Credit to liewcf.

Yes, printer drivers! We all typically only have one printer or tend to stick to one brand of printer, yet Mac OS X comes with a whopping 3 gigabyte of printer drivers for all sorts of models. This is so that when you buy a printer, you can get up and running instantly without having to download and install a driver. If you are convinced, however, that you’re never going to need drivers for a different brand of printer, you can safely delete those belonging to other brands.

Warning and Disclaimer!

You are DELETING STUFF. If you follow the instructions you will see just what you are deleting and be able to decide if it is the right thing for you to do. We are not responsible if you accidentally delete an essential file (although it is possible to recover from almost any situation!) If you ARE going to need a wide collection of printer drivers and you’re not sure you’ll be able to download them, you might want to skip this tutorial. But for 99% of users this isn’t the case.

Just.. be careful

How to Delete Those Pesky Drivers

1. Open up Finder (click on the smiley face on your Dock).

2. Navigate to your main hard drive (Macintosh HD, by default).

3. Navigate to Library.

4. Navigate to Printers.

5. Make a note of which brand of printer you are currently using. So, if you have an Epson printer, you don’t want to delete the Epson drivers. If you have a Canon printer, you don’t want to delete those..

6. Right click upon and select Delete for all of Brother, Canon, EPSON, FujiXerox, Gestetner, hp, Lexmark, RICOH, Samsung, and Xerox. Do NOT select other folders or files or you may cause problems! Also remember NOT to delete the folder for your printer vendor (e.g. EPSON or Canon).

Checking the Space Used

If you want to see just how much space the Printer folder is using (or any other folder, for that matter), you can use “Get Info” (Cmd+I while a folder is selected, or right click and choose “Get Info.”) On a full Printers folder this gives the following result:

Even if you leave a few different manufacturers’ drivers intact, you’re still going to be walking away with a free gigabyte or two! For example, the Xerox folder is 207 megabytes (approx), Lexmark is 311 megabytes, and EPSON is a whopping 1.41 gigabytes on its own! Even if you want to play it safe and know you will not ever use an Epson printer, just delete the Epson folder and that’s 1.41 gigabytes freed, just like that.

Therefore, I’m going to use this first post as a testbed for my own testing of the styles that will be used on this site. If I may quote myself:

“”This is a BLOCKQUOTE. Doesn’t it look pretty?Me — Just now

We also have some “strong” text and some that’s emphasized.

Am I boring you? Well, try some of the other posts!