Sunday, July 18, 2010

Programs Hang For A Long Time? Here's How To Kill Them.

By John Stewart

Many people are surfing the internet now a days and they are exposing themselves to a lot of different types of programs. For the most part this really isn't a big deal assuming that you are getting your programs from reliable sources.

The problem arises when you are using these programs on your computer and they hang. When a program hangs it can really kill your level productive (if it's happening way too often) and it's just plane old annoying. So, what can you do to prevent this? Kill the application from running. By "kill" I don't mean to delete it, all I mean is to just stop it from running and then restart the program all over again later on.

But why do some programs hang and others just don't? Well the short answer to it all has to do with your computers specific configurations and its own unique problems. For example, your computer can have a small driver problem that will effect just one program but when you decided to run that same program on another computer it runs just fine. The second computer didn't have that same driver problem and so it was able to run the program just fine. Sometimes when a program hangs, you kill it and then Windows tells you that a program had a problem. This is where Windows will give you an error code. You can type in that same error code to Google and try to figure out what the problem is. This tends to take a long time and involves a lot of detective work to resolve the problem. And as you might have been able to guess, its very specific to your computer's specifications and your computers exact problems. So instead of trying to address the issue of how to completely stop a program from constantly hanging, I'm going to give you a quick fix: how to stop it from hanging for a really long period of time by killing it.

Now I'm going to show you 2 different techniques. The very first one is to open up your task manager by pressing Ctrl + Shift + Esc at the same time and then to click on the tab that says "Application". Now when you are in that tab you will see a list of the applications that are running with their current status. If an application that you suspect is "hanging" (or is frozen) is on your computer then its status will be labled as "Not Responding". If you have a program that is not responding and you will like to stop it, just click on that application so that it is highlighted and at the bottom of the windows click on the button that says End Task. Keep in mind that if you have any unsaved work on your computer and you end task a program you will loose all of the unsaved data, so use this cautiously.

The second way to kill an application is to right click on it when you are in the Applications tab of the Task Manager and click on Go To Process. It will then take you to the Process tab with the program highlighted. Just right click on the program that is highlighted here and click on End Process Tree. A word of caution here: when you perform an End Process Tree you are killing the program that is hanging and also the programs that are linked to it. If the program that you want to kill either has unsaved work or is important you should not kill it as you might stop other programs that are linked to it from running.

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