But first, how would you know if an system has hung?
The three cardinal symptoms are the spinning beach ball, increased CPU usage and systemic unresponsiveness.
So the first option when faced with a frozen or unresponsive utility is to kill it.
Not literally, of course!
We can make a run at kill or “terminate” the program.
Usually, by forcing an software to quit, we lose any unsaved work.
Waiting for the program to resolve itself is a better alternative if you could afford the time.
Personally, I’m not quite patient enough.
So, it’s a compromise between overworking your CPU and data loss.
Then there is the third method: usingActivity Monitor.
Simply because I use it so often, accessibility is crucial.
If you didn’t know, Activity Monitor is located in'~/Applications/Utilities'.
Or you couldSpotlightfor it.
Activity Monitor is the evil twin brother of Window’s Task Manager.
Mainly, I use Activity Monitor to deal with unresponsive applications.
It doesn’t work all the time but when it does, you’ll be amazingly thankful.
If simply running Activity Monitor won’t solve your problem, you could investigate deeper.
Unfortunately, I can’t provide you with a screenshot because nothing has crashed yet (crosses fingers).
Whenever that happens, try going into the ‘View’ menu and choose ‘Send Signal to Process’.
On the window that pops up, choose ‘Hangup’, ‘Interrupt’ or ‘Kill’.
I find from experience that choosing ‘Interrupt’ may just bug the tool to become responsive again.
CPU load, for instance, is something simple but useful to know at all times.
If you want access to all this information, I suggestiSlayer’srange of monitoring applications.
