Sunday, March 25, 2018

Re-starting "Windows" Without Re-booting Your Computer

Tech tip for Windows: Ever have Windows freeze up on you or become unresponsive?  I have, often.  Well most ppl don't know that what we call Windows is a lot of smaller programs working together.  When Windows freezes up or gets slow, the issue is with a component of Windows, not Windows.  That component is simply called Explorer.  This is NOT Internet Explorer.  You can see it running in Task Manager as "explorer.exe".  (One thing that can cause problems is when somehow more than one copy of Explorer starts running.)  Now how to get Explorer to get unstuck/responsive without restarting your computer?

Fire up a copy of the command window.  Choose Start, then Run, then type "cmd" (no quotes) and hit Enter.  Different vers. of Windows may do it differently but you get the idea.  Next bring up Task Manager with Ctrl-Alt-Delete.  Now sort all running Processes by name and find "explorer.exe" in the list.  There may be more than one.  Now for each "explorer.exe", select it and kill the task.  Your desktop will disappear at some point but kill all "explorer.exe" processes.  Now close the Task Manager.  Now in your open cmd window, type "explorer.exe" (no quotes) and hit Enter.  Suddenly your Windows desktop re-appears.  Now you can close the cmd window if you want or leave it open.

This will save you having to re-start your computer, esp. when you have unsaved documents open that you want to avoid losing by powering down your computer or soft-booting it.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home