When an application isn’t responding, the obvious response is to attempt to close it with the red “X” in the top right corner of the application window, but often if the app is frozen or otherwise unresponsive, that button is likewise unresponsive and accomplishes nothing. At this point, you might try to right click on the app icon in the taskbar and select “Close Window”, which (in my experience) seems to work more often than the red X does. However, sometimes neither of those solutions does anything at all and the only option left is to open Task Manager and instruct Task Manager to shut down the process, which typically works immediately. So why the hell doesn’t Windows just run whatever script is executed by Task Manager when I press the red X or select “Close Window”? Why are there three seemingly unique approaches to ending a process with varying levels of success when the developers of Windows are clearly fully capable of designing one which works in all cases?
In: Technology
It’s basically the difference between the teacher asking you to stop talking or the teacher physically pushing you out of the classroom door.
Well, you asked to have it explained like you’re five 🙂
In more detal: Essentially, what the “Close” button (or right-clicking the task bar and selecting “Close”… or even pressing Alt-F4 … does is send a message to the application to please end itself. It may still ask the user if the data should be saved, close the database connection, etc. and even allow the user to cancel the process.
The task manager “end application” is not so kind: it simply removes the app from the list of running programmes (meaning: it won’t get any processor time any more), free all the memory (which can be reclaimed by other applications) and does a few other cleanups – but it never asks the program if it actually wants to be ended, nor will it give the user any opportunity to save data, etc.
Needless to say: use the task manager quitting function only when the other way fails. Things can go wrong in these “cleanups” and there is a risk that e.g. some memory or some other resources are not freed, or that there is still some interrupt pointing to the now defunct application, etc. This doesn’t happen much, but it *could* happen, and then you need to restart the computer to get back to a clean state.
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