I was in Safari when suddenly scroll wouldn’t work, then I got the beachball. None of the ways of bringing up force quite would work . . . holding shift command option escape for 5 seconds, going to the apple menu, option command escape, couldn’t bring up terminal to do the “top . . . kill PID” What do think happened? I recently installed Clips (holds multi clips in clipboard) which runs in the background, perhaps that conflicts with Safari, but then again I didn’t do any Copy and Pasting. Where can I look in logs to get an idea?
Anyway, with Force Quit not working, what should I have done? I the end, I held the power on/off button until it shut off, waited a minute and turned on Mac again. Little nervous as I got the blue screen for a while, but it went away and everything seems ok now.
— Royce
I assume you couldn't select restart or shut down either, right? If so, then your only other option would have been to wait for another 5 or 10 minutes or more to see if the offending process quit -- but maybe you did that too. So it sounds like a forced shutdown was your only option. If everything is OK now, then it will most likely remain OK. Unless, of course, the same thing happens again. Then you probably want to figure out what is wrong and uninstall it.
Right, couldn't access the apple menu at all, so couldn't do a restart or shutdown. I waited about 3 min . . . max 5 min certainly not 10. So next time wait up to 10 min.
Now if I forced shutdown (holding down power on/off) didn't work, then I would unplug Mac?? Is that the order?
I disable Clips from opening at login. It's a nice app when I need to do a lot of copying and pasting, otherwise not necessary. I am guessing that's the culprit as it's the most recent app I installed, and it's an app that gets "inside" the OS X. Valid reasoning?
You shouldn't ever have to unplug -- force shutdown should always work.
Disabling something is a good idea if you don't really need it. If happens again you rule that out. But if it never happens again, it doesn't necessarily mean that was the cause.
Oh, is there anyway to see if my hunch is correct by looking at logs? If yes, where would those logs be located?
If my hunch is correct (Clips is causing the problem), and I uninstalled it, then no damage done? Or damage already done??
You can run the Console application to look at logs. But it will be difficult to figure out the problem unless you are a systems programmer or something like that.
If there is damage done, then too late to worry about it now. Just make sure you do regular backups (Time Machine) and don't worry about it.
Last question. :) How serious of a problem of not even Force Quit not responding? In Windows world, that's just typical. In Mac world, do I have a problem . . . need to re-install system and app's??
I wouldn't worry about it unless it happens multiple times. Then a system re-install would be your next move.
So there's are no logs that record what happened that I could look at to see the root cause of the problem?
Run Console. That's where you will find the logs.
Ok, thanks for everything. :)
So I opened up Console and there was a log entry on the day of the crash that said Sender (PID) = Clips, Message = Could Not Resolve Service
Does that mean Clips is the culprit of the crash, or that Clips doesn't know what to do now that a crash occurred?
Only the developer of Clips can tell what that message means. Have you tried to contact them. Chances are it is not the reason for the crash, but just an error message produced by the service. Software, even when properly running, generates errors -- things that it can't find or access, etc.
I won't bore you with all the details but my "Force quit" option no longer works. When I click it I get a full screen that lists the applications I'm on, rather than the sidebar I used to get which let me click off applications I wanted closed. Now I just get a static full screen. Is there a way to reset or reboot force quit so it's back to the way it's supposed to be?
Let me know. Appreciate your help.
Paul
That's very odd. I've never heard of a full screen that shows that. I'd take it to an expert who can see it first-had and figure out what is going on.