How To Kill a Windows Program

It is frustrating to find a program in Windows not responding and Windows seems to do it quite often as well. Suddenly, a fine working program just stops responding and even the close button doesn’t work. Really, who likes things not doing their bidding? If they won’t listen to you, then they deserve to die!

This is exactly what we are going to show you in this tutorial. How you can kill or force-quit programs if they are not responding, using different methods. Different methods will address different situations, so you should use the required method to kill a program in Windows.

Method #1: Use Alt+F4 to Quit Programs

This is the first thing that you should try when you are stuck. Just press Alt+F4 and the current Window will close. Although, it is easier to just close programs with these keys, but it is not the best solution when it comes to handling unresponsive programs.

Alt+F4 is supposed to close programs and when you press Alt+F4, you are just commanding the current window to close. If it is unresponsive, it will not listen to this command as well just like it is not responding to the usual closing process.

However, this command can be quite useful if for some reason you can’t access the “Close” button and just give the command with these hotkeys.

Method #2: Use Windows Task Manager

You can force quit apps right from the Windows Task Manager. This method will surely close the unresponsive program by force and you can easily access it even if the unresponsive program is preventing you from accessing other Windows programs.

To start Task Manager, press Ctrl+Shift+Esc and the Window will open up above all currently opened windows . In there, click on “Applications” tab if you are not already there, and you will see all the programs that are currently open. You should see the unresponsive program in the list, probably with a status of “Not Responding”. Click on the Program to select it and to kill the program, click on “End Task” located at the bottom of the window.

This should close the program even if it is not responding, but there might still be a tiny delay depending on how bad the situation was. However, if you would like to quit the program instantly, then move on to the next step.

Method #3: Kill Program Process to Instantly Kill the Program

If you really want to quit a program instantly, then you can do that too, right in the Windows Task Manager. However, no data will be saved for that program and in cases it might also corrupt the program. So, if you don’t mind losing any data and just really want to get rid of the program, just follow the steps below.

Press Ctrl+Shift+Esc to open Task Manager just like we did above, and in the Task Manager right click on the program which you would like to force close. From the context menu that opens up, click on “Go To Process” located at the end of the menu to see all the processes.

In the “Processes” tab, the main Process of the program will be selected. Here you can just click on “End Process” and from the prompt, click on “End Process” again and the program will be killed instantly without trying to save the program’s data.

Here is a Video demonstration as well:

With above mentioned methods, you should be able to get out of any sticky situation where programs just don’t respond. However, if there are still any questions or you would like to share a better method to kill Windows programs, let us know in the comments below.

Karar Haider
Categories: Computers
Tags: Apps, Windows