I often have games on my old iMac freeze up. Other programs on the Mac still work fine, it’s just that game. Is there a way to force it to quit without having to restart my computer each time?
My first thought is that you should probably either get an update to the game in question or just stop playing it; sounds like it’s incompatible with your version of MacOS X or just too darn old to work well on your system. Or try quitting all other apps that you have running before you try to play the game and see if that helps out? Sometimes games just aren’t written very well even though they might be good fun to play!
When you do have a program that hangs, freezes or otherwise gets into a “stuck” place or loop — or, heck, sometimes you just see the beachball or spinner that indicates the program isn’t able to get back to a normal interactive mode — there are ways to force it to quit or stop running without restarting your computer.
In fact, the feature’s ingeniously called Force Quit. Let’s check it out…
First off, here’s my program running but the Quit option is greyed out:
There are various reasons that programs might prevent you from quitting, but at least in this case I can see the menu pop up from the program when I click on the program name on the menubar. When a program is non-responsive you often won’t be able to get to any menus either, so you won’t even be able to see if the quit option is available or not.
Instead, move your cursor over just a bit to the left and click on the Apple menu:
As you can see, choose “Force Quit…” to get to the force quit feature on MacOS.
Tip: If you can’t get the Apple menu to show up, click to switch into an app that is running, then try again. Sometimes if the computer’s focus is on the stalled or frozen program, that’ll confuse it.
Here’s what Force Quit looks like:
A program that’s frozen will typically have a red note adjacent to it saying “not responsive” or similar. If that isn’t the case, go back and try to quit the program normally as Force Quit is a big axe swing that should only be used when absolutely necessary.
One reason is that it literally stops the program dead in its tracks, so if it’s poised to write out an update to a file that’ll never happen. On a program like Pages that can result in loss of data.
Click on “Force Quit” if you’re really, really sure that’s what you want to do and the system will reiterate what I just said:
If you’re sure, click again on the “Force Quit” button. Done. Killed. Axed. And you should be back and ready to go.
But seriously if you’re finding a program keeps freezing or hanging, I’d try to find an update or replacement that’s more stable. Good luck!
Pro tip: While you’re here, don’t miss our extensive MacOS X Help Area with hundreds of handy tutorials on everything Mac!