Have you ever been working away at your Mac, thinking everything’s just peachy, when suddenly an application starts behaving as though it has a mind of its own? In the old days (prior to OS X), your only resort was to push the front panel restart button. Thankfully, OS X lets you do a Force Quit on any program that’s gone a little nutty. Force Quit can be found under the blue Apple logo in the upper left side of your monitor. Click on the Apple, then mouse on down to (what else?) Force Quit. This will open up a window that shows all the currently open applications. If it’s Garage Band, for example, that’s behaving badly, click on that in the window, then click on the Force Quit button on the bottom. In most cases, you can simply reopen the program and get back to work. If that doesn’t work, you might try a restart.
If that fails to cure the problem, open up Disk Utility from the Applications/Utilities folder, then select your hard drive from the source window on the left. The default function is “First Aid.” Down below that, you’ll see two buttons, one says “Verify Disk Permissions” and the other “Repair Disk Permissions.” Try verifying your drive first to see if your troublesome app has any “issues.” If so, go ahead and tell First Aid to Repair Disk Permissions (after making sure you have backups of all your most important files, of course). This is much like the old days when we had to “zap our PRAM.” The last resort would be to use the “Verify Disk” command, the click on “Repair Disk” if you are still seeing errors. That said, you’ll probably never have to go to such extreme measures, as Apple’s OS X is amazingly stable, which is great news for Mac users.