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
There’s essentially two ways of shutting down an application. Once is graceful, and one isn’t.
When you hit the close button on the window, it starts a graceful shutdown. This means that the program is allowed to interrupt this process. For example, it might ask you to save the document you’re working on. This means that if the application is misbehaving, it might not respond to this signal and not actually close.
When you do a force close from Task Manager, it does a non-graceful shutdown of the application. This means the application is not allowed to interrupt it. Instead, the shutdown happens entirely from the OS side.
Essentially, it’s the difference between asking someone to resign and having them clean out their desk, versus having to have security escort them out.
Latest Answers