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
When you click the X you are asking the application to finish up whatever it is doing and shut itself down safely.
When you kill it with the task manager, you are telling the operating system to turn it off hard – just deallocate its memory and stop any code it is executing.
Analogy – the x is your mother asking you to pause your game and come to dinner. The task manager is your mother unplugging your computer and dragging you by the hair to dinner.
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