Mac cracks are rare, but they do occur. So what should you do if you also experience some cracks on your Mac?
App crashes
Sometimes your apps freeze. You will not even be able to close the app and the revolving wait cursor will appear on the screen ~ a colorful circle known casually as the beachball or pinwheel of death.
Wait for some time to see if your app recovers. If not, then the only option is to dismiss that app ~ hold down the Ctrl and then click on the app’s icon in the Dock, then choose Force Quit. If you do no see that option, then hold down Alt and Ctrl together, and click the icon of Dock.
Occasionally a single ‘ force quit’ is not enough and you could need to do it many times.
Try repairing the disk permissions to ignore the future crashes ~ start the Disk Utility, and then choose your disk and click the repair disk permissions.
An app could unpredictably disappear and dialog box pop~up saying that the app has ‘ quit unpredictably’ . If you reopen the application then your work might have been secured ~ especially with the Apple’s own apps like the TextEdit.
System app freezes
If the Dock has frozen, then hold down Cmd and Alt and then tap Esc key. This will appear the force Quit apps dialog, where you can choose any app and then click on the Force Quit button. Otherwise, hit the Space+Cmd to open the spotlight > type activity monitor > press enter to run it > choose the application in the list and click on the Quit process button and then hit the Quit in the dialog box. If the application does not go away, repeat this step and click the Force Quit.
Occasionally the finder will freeze. If that occurs the desktop will become unresponsive too. Then the same Force quitting choices as above apply but first of all try holding down Alt+Ctrl, hitting the finder icon, and choosing relaunch.
If the whole system shows to freeze then try holding down the Alt+Shit+Cmd and Esc for about five seconds. That will force quit the top~most app which is causing the jam. If the system rests jammed, then you can force a reboot simply by holding the power button for around 5 seconds to power down, then hitting it again to boot as normal.
Bad cracks
A kernel panic occurs when something has left so badly wrong that Mac easily cannot continue working. It noises more severe than it is, although, the possibilities are your PC will reboot & return to normal.
With the OS X Mountain Lion, the Mac will reboot & you will notice the following gray text against the gray background: ‘’Your PC restarted due to a problem. Press a key or wait for some seconds to continue the starting up.’’
Kernel panics occur for all reasons and are normally not a worry unless they occur repeatedly. They sometime indicate the hardware faults, like problems with the Hard disk or RAM. You can confirm the condition of your hard drive simply by holding down Alt and then clicking on the Apple menu > choosing the system info. In the window which displays, choose your hard disk from the list and see underneath at the title that reads S.M.A.R.T. Status. ‘ Verified’ is fine. ‘About to Fail’ is bad.
Memtest will check your Mac’s RAM, but occasionally a visit to Genius bar is the only choice.
