Use Mail as a last-gasp frozen Finder repair helper

Aug 14, '07 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: tbg10101

When everything is seemingly lost, your Finder has crashed, Mirror Agent refuses to quit, and you're just about to pull out your eyebrows ... just calm down, as I have a hint for you. What you need, if you're in that predicament, is Activity Monitor. A wonderful little app that resides in your Utilities folder.

"But wait," you say, "I can't use the Finder! How am I supposed to get to the Activity Monitor?" Right you are, but luckily the Dock almost always works. And if you have Apple's Mail application in your dock, you're in business. First, open Mail if it isn't open already. Then click the New button and then the Attach button. In the resulting dialog, choose the Activity Monitor (from Applications » Utilities). When you see the attachment in the new message, right-click (or control-click) on the attachment. In the menu that appears, choose Open With » Other, and choose the Activity Monitor again. When Mail prompts you, choose the Open button.

When Activity Monitor launches, choose All Processes from the drop-down menu at the top of the window. Type the name of the offending app in the Filter field. Click on the app in the list box and press the Quit Process button then, when prompted, press the Force Quit button. This fixes many problems that may arise from a frozen Finder, so don't forget it.

[robg adds: The interesting thing here, to me anyway, is using Mail to launch pretty much any program on your machine. In the generic version, just attach any tiny document to the new email, control-click on it, then pick the application you'd like to run from the Other option in the Open With menu. In my testing, this worked with everything I tried. Interesting...]

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