When a computer starts to freeze or operate slowly and doesn’t respond, ending the task(s) from the task manager usually ends the program and the problem. Why does this work better than simply canceling the task with ALT+F4/pressing the cancel button in the window?
In: Technology
To understand this I think you want to understand what differentiate killing a task, sending a shutdown command and pressing the “X”.
A shutdown command (Pressing X, quit from the software, in some cases alt – f4) is like when the factory closes down at the end of the day. Workers will put tools back, turn of all machines calmly and orderly and clean up the work space. In computers that would be writing caches/deleting caches, writing saved setting to a config file, sending some data to a server, making sure open documents are saved.
A “kill” command, what task manager does, is like the fire alarm going off in a factory. Everyone just drops everything and runs out. (Maybe more accurately it would be like if someone just took the factory and launched into space with no traces left of it. The OS just drops the task associated with the application”)
Alt – F4 is a Windows OS specific shortcut that sends a kill command to currently focused window. Which is why it often doesn’t work for some application that fail to launch completely. Applications can be made to “intercept” this command though.
I don’t know the full technical details of how an OS handles the different terminate signals it can send, but I feel this analogy explains why task manager often works, it simply doesn’t do all the things a normal shutdown of an application does.
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