Question: How do you stop a non-terminating program?

Both Mathematica and Maple have no procedure for stopping an out-of-control, non-terminating computation, except for pulling the plug on the comptuer. Whenever I give Maple a computation which is too big for it to handle, it not only does not return an answer, but it crashes my entire computer. It makes dragging up any other windows nearly impossible. There is no "stop" or "escape" key. And, even after I successfully terminate the program by right-clicking and closing the file, I hear my computer still grinding away as if it is still computing for Maple, and my computer is still (practically) frozen. The only way to fix this is to reboot my computer - and then, only if the computer will respond to my mouse to allow it to get over to the shut down button. Often, it will not, and the only way I can reboot is by physically pulling the plug and replugging. Even the physical reboot button will not work under these conditions.

I think it would be a good idea for Maple to have some way in the software of shutting down a computation before it gets out of hand, rather than me physically pulling the plug and replugging.

Also, none of the suggestions about creating matrices using the sidebar dropdown list helped. I see that that sidebar dropdown matrix command created some kind of a matrix, but not one I could do anything with (determinants, inverses, etc.)