I Forgot the Three Finger Salute
June 1st, 2005It has been so long that I had to Force Quit an applicaton on my Mac that I forgot the 3 finger combination. It is Cmd-Option-Esc, but I just could not think of it. Imagine the day when I forget Ctrl-Alt-Delete. Could that day ever come?
The new question is, why did my Mac lock up? It was probably running iTunes all day and it locked up when my screen saver was running. Perhaps I got one of those rare Mac viruses. Maybe I will try the first Anti-Virus software I have considered for MacOS X, ClamXav. It is free and based on an open-source project, so I may as well try it.
It is installed and scanning now.
Update: The scan found virus signatures in my Apple Mail mbox folders. They do not affect the Mac because they were all Win32 viruses. And they were all from the mailings lists I subscribe to. Perhaps these mailing lists should be filtering those emails.
June 3rd, 2005 at 9:32 am
The mac 3 finger salute is a bit rubbish. It only lets you kill applications. When some thing that isnt an application starts playing up, using 100% CPU, you are basically knackered, especially when the entire UI pretty much locks up, preventing running performance monitor.
ctrl+alt+del is great in comparison - it almost always lets you regain control over a messed-up computer, and lets you kill individual processes.
June 3rd, 2005 at 10:34 am
That is very true. I could not simply Force Quit whatever was hanging my iBook. I had to force it to reboot. Normally I would be worried about data loss due to that, but fortunately MacOS X provides a journaling filesystem.
I still lose everything I was just doing. Apple should fix that.