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