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
The red X is part of the program. When you click on it, it calls a routine in the program. Developers put all of their cleanup stuff in there — saving settings, closing files, freeing leftover memory, etc. The program closes when this cleanup is done. Clicking close on the taskbar is the same as clicking the X.
Closing an application through Task Manager just kills the process. That cleanup routine is not run. This can be a bad thing, and certainly not something you want to do regularly. It’s only for when a program has frozen so badly that it can’t accept the request to run that program close cleanup routine.
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