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
In short, Operating System can in most cases easily get rid of a program.
However, it’s alse extremely beneficial to make sure that program is given a chance to shut down properly, without corrupting your files or breaking other perhaps valuable things just by pressing red X. That’s why red X is handled usually by the program itself. It just receives it as a “please shut down now” type suggestion. Program has plenty of microseconds or even milliseconds to finish what it was doing and clean up after itself to make sure closing it down ends without a mess.
But if OS decides to just force close the program, well, that’s it. If the program was writing a file, say, saving your progress, that file might very well be rendered unusable. Any kinds of changes the the system could even just brick your computer if there was some important enough change underway and next restart your computer can’t figure out what was going on.
So yeah, OS forcibly closing the program is not that great to have as your first method of trying to shut things down.
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