One of Task Manager's most useful roles is that of dealing with problems that cause programs, or your whole computer, to hang
(to "freeze up," so that the mouse and keyboard don't work normally).
Even when you can't get the mouse or keyboard to work, pressing
Ctrl+Alt+Del and choosing Start Task Manager may get Task Manager open
for you.
1. Closing frozen programs
Once Task Manager is open, click the Applications
tab. If a particular program is hung, its Status column will usually
read Not Responding rather than Running. To close the hung program,
click its name in the Task column, and then click the End Task button.
Task Manager will try to close the program normally, so that if you were
working on a document at the time, you may be able to save any changes.
(So, don't expect the program to close immediately.)
If the program won't close, you'll see a warning that
moving ahead will close the program leaving unsaved work behind. To
forge ahead, click End Now. The program may try to restart itself,
depending on how it is designed.
Most likely, a process of reporting the problem and
finding a solution will start after you end a program in this way. If
you choose to allow Windows to send information about the program error,
Windows sends information to a database of problems and searches that
database for known problems and their solutions. You won't always get a
solution to the problem, but many times I've received information about
an incompatible device driver or other issue by allowing Windows to
report the problem.
If you don't have time to wait through that whole
reporting process, you can cancel out of each dialog box by clicking its
Cancel button.
2. Switching and starting tasks
If the system is hung in such a way that you can't
use the Start menu or taskbar normally, and you want to work with open
program windows individually, Task Manager provides some ways to
accomplish that.
To bring a running program to the top of the stack of
windows on the screen, and make it the active window, click its name in
the list of running tasks, and then click the Switch To button. If you
were working on a document in that program, you can save your work, and
then exit the program normally (assuming that program is running
normally).
If you need to bring up a diagnostic program or
debugger, or simply need to start some other program, and you know the
startup command for that program, click the New Task button. The Create
New Task dialog box, shown in Figure 1, opens. Type the startup command for the program (or the complete path to the program, if necessary), and click OK.
The Windows menu shown in Figure 2
offers many of the same window-arranging options you see when you
right-click the clock. You can click any program name in the Tasks
column (on the Applications tab) and choose Bring to Front to bring a
buried program window to the top of the stack. This is handy when a hung
program is hogging up the entire screen, and you need to see something,
perhaps to save some work in progress, behind that hung program window.
3. Restarting a Hung Computer
If your computer is so locked up that you can't get
to Task Manager, or stop the offending program, you can try other
things. If pressing Ctrl+Alt+Del works, taking you to the options in Figure 3,
you can try any of the options shown. Logging off or restarting will
likely be your best bet. If at all possible, Windows will attempt to
give you a chance to save any unsaved work.
If the program that's hung is also the one that
contains the unsaved work, there may be no way to save that work. You
might just have to restart without saving. Hopefully you save your work
often so you don't lose too much work.
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You can configure some programs to save
automatically, such as every few minutes. Check the program's options to
see if this capability is available in the programs you use most often.
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