Spinning beachball of death.. how to stop it?

[NSK123]

Today I had uTorrent running with 10 downloads while surfing the web, and suddenly I get the spinning beachball of death,

..now I have been a Windows user for years and I went ctrl+alt+del immedietly, but ofcourse I couldn't open the activity Monitor that way to see if it was uTorrent or something else that was hogging.

So my question is, when I get the beachball next time how to I get out of it if I can't open up the activity monitor to shut down whatever that is spiking the macbook into getting the beachball..

In windows I usually just find whatever app that crashed and then shut it down but on OSX I found that I couldn't/didn't know how to do this.. So I had to manually shut down the machine after 5min by press/hold of the power button.

 

[mrchinchilla]

Today I had uTorrent running with 10 downloads while surfing the web, and suddenly I get the spinning beachball of death....

Cmd+Opt+Esc or Apple Menu > Force Quit.
Or ctrl+opt click the icon in the dock and select 'Force Quit' from the contextual menu.
Usually the Application which is locking up gets the 'beachball' so if you're getting it right down to the Finder, maybe it's a bigger issue. The beachball is usually provoked by a error within the App, or lack of available memory. You can look in Activity Monitor to check running processes. Think of it like the Windows Task Manager.

 

[t0mat0]

Maybe using utorrent and using the memory settings (if they've got them in the mac build) might help too much IO for the HD to decrease beachballing.