Crash Starts

Crash Starts
Mac Tip#65/31-July-2002

Sometimes your Mac will freeze or lock up solid. There is absolutely nothing you can do. You’ve tried the Force Quit from last week’s Tip but nothing works at all. The cursor won’t move. Nothing at all works. You’re stuck.

In this case you have to crash start the computer. Depending which model you have there are various ways to do this.

Command, Control, Power

The good, old-fashioned way was to hold down both the Command (Apple) and Control keys and firmly press the Power key on the keyboard.

The paperclip method

Some Macs though won’t respond to this. For early iMacs you need to find a metal paperclip. Straighten it out and locate the small hole near the USB ports on the right-hand side of the computer. The hole is marked with a triangle icon.

Push the paperclip in and hold it in for a moment or two. This should switch off the computer and now you can start it up in the usual way.

Some Powerbooks and iBooks also have a small hole which fits a paperclip in order to reset the machine.

Later models of iMac did away with the need for a paperclip and have a button where the hole used to be.

On the newest iMacs (as far as I know) there is no reset button. On these Macs you simply press and hold the power button for 5 seconds.

If your computer locks up so much you can’t do anything else then try the key combination first. If that fails look for the Reset button and try that.

And remember — don’t use this as a normal method of dealing with things, but only as a last resort.