Kendra asks,”How do I eject a CD or DVD on my Mac when pressing the eject button doesn’t work?”

This is a great question that I myself had to search apple support for the answer when I first had this problem on my first mac. Especially when you think that a stuck disc is going to mean sending your machine in for repair. Firstly, remember old CD and DVD drives from those PC computers you used to use and how when I disc wouldn’t eject you would grab a paper clip and bend it straight to press on that magic manual eject button? Don’t try that on a mac, cause you will search forever and never find such a button. In fact you might damage something. The solution is easier than it might seem.

In general a CD or DVD can be ejected on a Mac (MacBook or MacBook Pro) using the physical eject button or from the finder without any problems, but occasionally this don’t work and the disc icon might disappear from your Desktop and you can’t get the disc out of your computer. However, there is a trick you can try to extract the stuck disc.

• Restart your Mac
• After you hear the startup chime, press and hold your trackpad button
• After a minute or so and you think nothing is gonna happen the disc ejects
• Release the button once the disc ejects

99% of the time this will work. The other 1% has a more advance solution that I won’t publish. So if it doesn’t work for you. Just contact us and we’ll walk you through it.

If you have been a mac user for long enough time you will know all about the Expose feature. If not then here is a quick review….

Expose allows you to quickly do the following:
See All the windows you have open,
Push all windows to the side to quickly view just your desktop,
See just windows from the current application

These key commands are some of the most commonly used keys on my keyboard. By default,

F9- Shows All Windows
F10- Shows Application Windows
F11- Shows Desktop

While you can set hot corners or mouse shortcuts (a tip for another post) for these commands, most mac users quickly learnt these keys when they bought their first mac. However, if you have just bought yourself a brand spankin new mac, or got yourself a new Aluminum keyboard you will notice that F9, F10,F11 are now defaulted to “Next”, “Mute”, and “Volume Down” respectively. While this keyboard now included F3 as the new “Expose - Show All Windows” command it leaves the other two commands, most importantly, “Show Desktop” out to dry. Oh sure you can press “Function” and F11 to still get to the “Show Desktop” feature but on both the macbook, and the keyboards have the “FN” key in a very poor location which makes this key not very “short.”

AH, there is a solution.
By default, ⌘ + F3 will “Show Desktop” and Control + F3 will “Show Application Windows”

This actually turns out to be quite ergonomical and sooner than later you will forget F11.

BONUS: Pressing ⌥ + F3 will bring up System Prefs for Expose and Spaces. As well you will find that ⌥ + F12 will bring up System Prefs for Sound

EVER MORE BONUS:

⌘ = Command
⌥ = Option
⌃ = Control