First things First - Starting up and shutting down

I'm no expert on the Mac, so listening to me isn't going to make you one. I'll probably tell you a lot of true things, but I'm sure some of what I'm going to say is a dangerous reduction of more complex things, but I don't think my dumbing down (or just plain faulty understanding) will hurt you. That said, I use Mac computers every day and my understanding makes things work great for me.

This is not going to be a fanboy series, there are things I dislike about the Mac, and the first thing is how dangerous it is to simply turn the Mac off without shutting down. Windows doesn't particularly like to be treated this way either, but the Mac, perhaps owing to its being built on top of a "real" operating system like Unix (obviously I'm talking about a modern version (as of this writing, OS X Leopard) of Mac, really doesn't like it. So don't do it unless you've followed all the advice in this post.

Mac computers turn on by pressing the on/sleep button (the only button on the mac). If the machine is off, pressing lightly on the button will turn it on. If you press the button when the machine is running it will go to sleep. Putting the machine to sleep while things are up and running generally works ok, I'll address caveats to that in another post (which I'll later link to this and title "MacBooks" since the caveats are a particular problem with laptops.

The on/sleep button is also a "force shutdown" button. If you have tried everything and you can't shut the Mac down, then (and only then) you can elect to force the Mac to shut down. You do that by holding down the button until the thing shuts down. But, don't do that, because, it is really not good for your computer. If you do it indiscriminately, you're liable to hurt your system in such a way that recovering your data will not be easy or possible.

So how do you shut down? In most cases all you need to do is to use the "shut down" menu option. In our next lesson I'll introduce you to the Mac screen and basic operations. But for now, what you need to know how to do to shut your computer down (or to "restart" it) is the following: in the top left hand edge of your screen is an image of an Apple. If you click that you will see a menu like this --





I've highlighted "restart". Selecting that with the mouse will bring up a confirmation menu and restart the computer. You can also choose, "sleep" and "shutdown". On the mac, when the shutdown is complete, the computer turns off. You won't need to touch the button again until you want to turn it on or wake it from sleeping.

A couple caveats to this nice simple solution.

1. Some programs are stupid, like Novell GroupWise for Mac, and they don't know how to shut themselves down when you ask to restart or shutdown and they need to be closed individually. For now, I'll just say you that if you get a warning that some program prevented shutdown or restart then you can go and close those programs and try again. In most cases, merely trying to shut the system down again will do the trick.
2. Programs sometimes "stop responding" and won't let you shut them down. If this happens you can use the "Force Quit" option, which will usually force a program to shut down. There are three ways to get to "Force Quit". If you can click the apple as in the picture above you can select the menu option "force quit" and then select the errant program. You can also CNTRL click the program icon and select force quit. Finally, there is a keystroke to bring up the force quit dialog. Pressing ALT Command (apple) and ESC will bring up the force quit box. Sometimes you have to ask to force quit a couple times, and sometimes you have to wait a while for it to work.
   

Once in a blue-moon you may experience the nightmare when nothing works, you can't shut applications down or you can't get the system to shut down. In those cases you have to resort to holding the on / off button down until the system powers down.

But don't do that...