How to close an unresponsive program in Windows®

Windows is the most widely used operating system and this is the one for which the maximum software and applications are designed. Windows is a good multitasking operating system and has offered a lot to its users. You can work on multiple programs with ease and keep many applications open at a time. All applications and files are handled by the operating system and they stay resident in the memory till the time they are closed. More and more applications are programmed and developed for Windows operating system and some of them are not always tested to work on the same. Such applications at times make the system to crash or become unresponsive. Not only such applications become unresponsive, but they also make other Windows applications to hang up because of memory conflicts or read and write conflicts. Many applications offer you options to save your work when they do not respond so that you at least do not lose the work done so far, but not all the applications give you this liberty. When an application or a program hangs up, you have no choice other than closing it and opening it again. Closing an application from its close button on the top right corner may also not work because this close button is also a part of the application. In such cases, to close the application you would need help of the controller managing all the running applications. This controller in Windows operating systems is known as the Task Manager.

In this post I will let you know how to use the Task Manager to close any non-responsive application.

Step 1: Try to close the application from its Close button and Windows might give you further options to force close the program. If you get this option it is well and good else go to step 2.

Step 2: Right click on the Task Bar and select Task Manager from the context menu. You can also chose to press ‘Ctrl’ + ‘Alt’ + ‘Delete’ keys together to get to the Task Manager.

Step 3: Once you have the Task Manager open you will find a few tabs in that window, but the first two Tabs, Applications and Processes are of our interest. Click on the Applications Tab and then right click on the application which is not responding and then select End Task. This will help you closing the application. If not then go to step 4.

Step 4: Before you click on Processes Tab you must be aware of the actual .exe name of the program which you want to close. For example if you want to close Microsoft Word then you must know that its process name is winword.exe. similarly right click on your process and then select ‘End task’.

Steps given above are the only ways of closing any application from within Windows. If nothing works, then you can try to logoff or restart the system.