We've all experienced the frustration of a computer that stops responding. If you're using a program that uses a lot of RAM, your screen may freeze and your entire system may crash. At such times, it's difficult to regain control of your PC. Luckily, there are several ways in Windows to close the problematic application.
Staring at a frozen screen and waiting for your PC to respond can be frustrating. Usually, your computer gives you the option to wait for it to regain control of the situation, but that can take several minutes. Often, the problem has to do with the execution of a program, and closing it would resolve the error in a flash.
The most widely used operating system in the world, Windows, offers several tools to close applications on your computer instantly. This way, you will save yourself long waits and you will not have to resort to the famous forced shutdown. The methods we will talk about are available in both version 10 of Microsoft's software and in the latest update, Windows 11.
Use Windows Task Manager
Task Manager allows you to manage programs and other processes running in Windows. If an application stops responding and you cannot move the cursor to manually go to this tool, you can do so via keyboard shortcuts. There are two ways to do this:
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Pressing the Ctrl + Shift + Esc keys at the same time will open a new window with all the running programs.
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Press the Ctrl + Alt + Del keys simultaneously. A menu will appear and we will have to select the “Task Manager” option.
Next, you just need to locate the app that is causing the problem. Usually, it will be the one that you opened just when the screen froze. However, data from memory, CPU, disk, and network can help us find out which program is causing us to not be able to use Windows as normal. Once we know which app is causing the problem, just right-click on it and hit “ End task”.
What if Task Manager is not working?
We won't always be able to open the Task Manager. If the program has frozen the screen, and even pressing the keys mentioned above doesn't open the window of running programs, there are alternatives. With Windows, we can close applications directly. All we have to do is press the Alt + F4 keys.
This option is not a favorite among users, as it automatically closes the program that is open. But there will be cases where there is no other alternative. If we resort to pressing Alt + F4, we should know that the app will close, without saving anything that we have done. For example, if it is a Word document or a video that we are editing in Adobe Premiere Pro, we will lose all the progress we have made.
From the Windows command prompt
Another way to close programs is through the Command Prompt, which can be accessed by pressing the Win + R keys. A small window will appear in the lower left corner in which you must type "cmd" and then press the Enter key.
Next, you will need to type the command “tasklist”. You will be presented with a list of all the running Windows processes. All you need to do is find the name of the problematic program and type “taskkill /im PROGRAM_NAME.exe /f”. For example, “taskkill /im chrome.exe /f”. If you cannot identify the program by its name, use its PID (process ID) instead of the name.
