Macs are reliable computers, but they are not immune to malfunctions. These include freeze-ups, where the system becomes unresponsive, and you can’t use your computers.
Occasionally, the screen of your Mac will be completely frozen, and even the mouse cursor cannot move. However, this is a rare occurrence. Usually, your mouse cursor will continue to move but instead of an arrow it will show a spinning ball. You may be able to click on windows, but you cannot interact with your Mac at all or open anything.
Although the circumstances are neither pleasant nor terrible, what can you do if they happen to you? Where can you find the instructions for unfreezing your Mac? We will examine a few possible solutions in this guide if your Mac or MacBook hangs.
Ways for Unfreezing a Mac
Sometimes, it is easy and quick to unfreeze a Mac. Sometimes you’ll encounter a freeze when you’re using a specific app, but other times your Mac will freeze randomly, no matter what you’re doing.
A freeze could be a result of malware on your Mac or a hardware problem. Try these common solutions if you’re experiencing a freeze.
- Force quit apps
You can force quit apps in macOS with a simple tool. There is a keyboard shortcut that you can use to open this. It often works when your Mac is otherwise unresponsive. It is possible to quickly exit frozen apps, and that will quickly restore control to your frozen Mac.
Follow these steps to force quit the apps:
- If you have any open work, save it. Otherwise, you will lose it
- Next, press Cmd + Opt + Escfor starting the Force Quit Applications tool
- Select what you want to quit among running apps, and press the Force Quitbutton
- Lastly, In the pop-up screen, tap on Force Quit
- Reboot the Mac
Most of the time, rebooting your Mac will solve your problem and further assist in speed up your Mac of yours. Depending on how frozen your Mac is, this might not be an option. The Mac cannot be rebooted if you cannot access any menu or move the mouse cursor. But if it’s just one or two apps frozen, your computer might be able to be rebooted.
You can reboot your Mac normally by following these steps:
- Go to home screen, and click on the Apple icon
- Next, Click on Restart
- But, Make sure Reopen windows when logging back inis not ticked
- Lastly, Click Restart
- Turn off your Mac
Generally, forcing your Mac to shut down is a bad idea Nevertheless, if your Mac is completely frozen and you cannot access the menus to shut it down normally, or if your mouse cursor is completely frozen, then you might not have much choice.
The procedure of turning off a Mac :
- Push and hold the Power button
- Next, Wait for Mac’s to shut down
- Rest for some time, and start your Mac
- Disable background processes that consume resources
Mac comes with some great processors regardless of whether they use Intel or Apple silicon. However, all processors have a finite amount of processing power, so if your processor gets overloaded, your Mac may hang. Usually, this occurs when you have a lot of software or an app that is particularly demanding. In other cases, it may be caused by poorly written software.
You can also use Mac Optimizer Pro software for this purpose, within some clicks you can easily optimize your Mac. It automatically disables irrelevant background processes
You can prevent your Mac from freezing by stopping apps that consume a lot of processing power. This can be done through Activity Monitor.
Here’s how you can stop background processes on your Mac:
- Start Activity Monitor under Applications > Utilities
- Find apps that are using a high CPU percentage. Once you’ve found one, click it.
- Select Quit. If this doesn’t work, try again with Force Quit instead
- Remove newly installed apps
A poorly designed app may be causing your Mac to freeze. In that case, removing the offending app would be the easiest solution. Those who install new apps will be the most likely offenders, so you should focus on removing those. In case your Mac freezes at startup and you can’t log in normally, you may need to boot into safe mode first.
Here are instructions for finding and removing recently installed Mac apps:
- Click the button to view the list of items in the Applications folder on your Mac
- Next, right-click anywhere in the top bar where the Size, Name, etc. are listed. Select Date Added
- This creates a new Date Added column. Click on it to sort your Mac items by the date they were added.
- You can move apps to the trash by right-clicking them and choosing Move to Trash (or Move to Bin).
- Check disk’s heath
Hardware breaks down from time to time, which is unfortunate. If your Mac keeps freezing, it could simply be due to a failing hard drive or SSD. It could also result from a less catastrophic form of data corruption, which can be corrected. In either case, you can start by using the macOS Disk Utility.
How to check the disk health of your Mac:
- Launch Disk Utility, and select Applications > Utilities
- Go to First Aid
- Select Run
- Click the Continue button
- After that, wait for Disk Utility, and scan your hard drive. The software will inform you if any problems are detected
- Reset the NVRAM on your Mac
NVRAM (non-volatile random access memory) is the non-volatile memory in your Mac. Your Mac may be fixed by resetting the NVRAM from time to time. In contrast, newer Macs that contain Apple’s M1 chip don’t allow you to reset it, which means this only applies to Intel Macs.
Here’s a quick guide to resetting the NVRAM on your Mac:
- Reboot your Mac
- Hold down Cmd + Opt + P + R keys at the same time, until a gray screen appears
- Hold these keys until your Mac starts up a second time and you hear the startup chime
- After that, release all keys