Stop Your Mac from Freezing Up

Is your Mac completely frozen? Is the swirling icon sitting there, spinning constantly as you frantically try to regain control of your computer? Crashes and freezes on OS X are uncommon, but they can be catastrophic when they do occur. Follow this guide to get yourself unfrozen and track down what was causing the freezing in the first place.

Steps

Getting Your Mac Unfrozen

  1. Open Activity Monitor on a sluggish machine. If you are still able to open things on your computer, but it is running really slow, you can use the Activity Monitor to see what is eating up your system resources. You can find the Activity Monitor in the Utilities subfolder of your Applications folder.
    • Sort the Activity Monitor list by CPU. You can click the column heading to sort by that value. The CPU value is shown as the percentage of your CPU’s power that a program is using. Programs using a high percentage of CPU may be causing your computer to slow down.
    • Sort the Activity Monitor list by RSIZE. This is the amount of memory that the program is using to run. A lot of newer programs use a significant amount of memory when running, but if there is a program here that is taking up the majority of your resources then it could be slowing your computer down.
    • Close the offending program. Once you have found a program that is causing your slowdown, select it on the list and click the “Quit Process” button in the upper-left corner of the window. You will lose any unsaved work in that program.
  2. Force quit the frozen program. Most freezes are caused by a program that has failed to run correctly and is causing your system to lock up. You can force quit an active program by pressing Command + Option + Esc. Select the program that is not responding and click Force Quit.[1]
    • You will lose any unsaved work in the program that you force quit.
  3. Reboot your Mac. If you are not able to move the mouse on the screen or resume any sort of functionality, you’ll need to reboot your Mac in order to get things working again. Since you most likely can’t access the Shut Down menu, you’ll need to do a physical shut down.
    • Press and hold the power button on your computer for a few seconds. You must keep holding the power button until your system shuts off.
    • Do not unplug the computer in order to shut it down.
    • Once the computer has shut down, wait a few moments and then turn it on as you normally would.

Preventing It from Freezing

  1. Clean up some space on your hard drive. If your primary drive has less than 10 GBs of space, you’re probably going to start experiencing some slowdown. The less free space you have, the higher the chance that you will encounter a problem.
    • Free-up-Space-on-Your-Macintosh-Computer has many useful tips on how to free up space you may be using without knowing it.
  2. Check if your document is corrupted. If you always encounter freezes while opening a certain document or file, but other files work fine, then that file may be corrupted. Avoid opening the file, and delete it if possible. You may be able to recover some of the data, so check online for processes related to the file type.
  3. Update your software. Make sure you are running the latest version of OS X, and that all of your installed software is up to date. You can update your OS X and Mac Store software by opening the Apple menu and selecting Software Update.
    • For programs installed from other sources, you will need to run the update tool from within the program or download the latest version.
  4. Verify and repair your hard disk. There could be errors on your disk that are causing your computer to hang and become unresponsive. You can use the Disk Utility program to run diagnostic checks on the hard disk. You can find Disk Utility in the Utilities subfolder of your Applications folder.
    • Select your disk in the left menu. Click the First Aid tab and then select Verify Disk. If any errors are detected, then you will be given the option to attempt to repair the disk.
    • You may need to reboot your computer in order to repair the disk.
  5. Boot into Safe Mode. Safe Mode will run diagnostic checks on your hard drive and folder structure, and will only load the files necessary for your computer to start. This can help you determine if another program is causing your computer to freeze.[2]
    • Shut down your Mac completely. From a powered-down state, turn the Mac back on. Immediately after hearing the startup sound, press and hold the Shift key.
    • Hold the Shift key until you see a gray Apple logo and the spinning progress indicator. Because of the diagnostics, the boot process will take longer than a standard boot.
    • Once the computer boots into Safe Mode, check and see if any freezing occurs. When you are done in Safe Mode, reboot your computer as you normally would.[3]
  6. Reinstall troublesome programs. If there is a certain program that is consistently giving you difficulties, reinstalling the program may help getting it running correctly. This article will guide you through the steps of deleting the program and all of its related files, and Install-Software-on-a-Mac will help you install the program again.
    • While you are deleting programs, browse what you have installed and delete the programs you don’t need anymore. Not only will this save you space, but it may keep them from potentially running in the background and slowing your computer down.
  7. Reinstall your operating system. If all else fails and you simply cannot get your computer to stop freezing, you may need to wipe your drive and reinstall your operating system. You will lose all of the data on your hard disk, so be sure to save everything you need to an external drive or upload it to the cloud.
    • For a complete guide on how to reinstall your operating system in just a few minutes, read Wipe-a-Mac-Clean.
  8. Upgrade your RAM. In some cases, your computer may simply not have enough memory to run the programs that you want. If you are finding that you are often maxing out your available memory in the Activity Monitor, you might want to consider adding RAM. Your computer will need to have available slots for the RAM to be installed.[4]
    • For instructions on installing RAM on an iMac, follow this guide.
    • For instructions on installing RAM on a Mac Mini, follow this guide.

Related Articles

Sources and Citations

  1. ↑ http://macyay.com/what-to-do-when-your-mac-hangs-or-freezes/
  2. ↑ http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/fixing-a-frozen-mac.html
  3. ↑ http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1564?viewlocale=en_US
  4. ↑ http://www.macworld.com/article/2027920/mac-troubleshooting-how-to-handle-freezes-and-crashes.html
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