When you’re using your computer and a certain program or process crashes, it can cause a series of problems. Normally, the best thing to do is open up Windows Task Manager and try to terminate the troublesome application. Sometimes the ‘End Task’ window will appear on the desktop for you to try and force the program to close but it doesn’t always work. The application may not respond to requests to close it down completely, and then you have to try and close it down manually. After that, you have to navigate to, and relaunch the program to get going again.
While the standard Windows Task Manager is a very familiar tool to most people, it can be a bit cumbersome when trying to close down troublesome programs because it sometimes will keep popping up the same windows for you to click on. The more advanced user may already be running an advanced task manager such as Process Explorer, but for a quick and simple way of closing down programs there is another piece of software which could make this easier.
There is a simple tool called Task ForceQuit Pro which works in a similar way to the ‘Applications’ tab in Windows Task Manager but with a few more useful options when dealing with crashed or hung software. If you have data you wish to try and save when an application seems to have hung, you could try to Recover the crashed program using the Windows Resource Monitor first, which was in a previous article.
Download the software and run the setup to install the program. Make sure to untick the ‘Try CleanMyPC for free’ option during the install process. The program will start automatically after installation and will display a list of running applications. To exit Task ForceQuit Pro completely, close the main window and right click the tray icon, then choose ‘Quit’, or Force Quit the program from its own window if you need to.
The interface has a nice layout and each application is clearly displayed, along with the current user, how many windows the task is running and the text displayed in each window’s title. Each task has a ‘Force Quit’ button which will try and force the application to close if you cannot close it by using the affected program itself. There is also a ‘Restart’ button that will handily restart the application after it’s been closed, saving you the trouble of navigating to the icon to launch it again yourself. To terminate the task, simply press the button that best suits your need. The program list and close options are also available by right clicking on the programs tray icon.
There are three buttons at the bottom of the window. The ‘Shutdown PC’ and ‘Restart System’ are self explanatory, as is the ‘Restart Explorer’ button which is helpful if an application has hung or crashed an Explorer window or the Task Bar. Do be VERY CAREFUL with the Shutdown and Restart buttons as they offer no form of confirmation, so if you click on one by accident, you will lose anything that isn’t saved in your open programs. These would have been far safer with either an ‘Are you sure?’ dialog box, or tucked away in a menu so there can be no mistakes.
Task ForceQuit Pro is easy to use and does its job pretty well, but apart from the restart / shutdown button issue, there are a couple of other things which really annoyed me while testing this software out.
The first is that you cannot actually use any of the buttons in the program because a window will pop up asking you to activate the program for free, which on the face of it doesn’t seem like such a terrible thing. That is until you realise the tick box to ‘Occasionally send me news…’ cannot be unticked as the activation button greys out if you do. For the moment at least, this is easily worked around by inputting any text as long as it finishes with a recognised email service name. ie; hotmail.com or gmail.com. After this, you get a window saying check your email to activate the program, but I never received anything even after several days and it works without the need for any further activation.
The second annoyance is after closing your chosen task in the list, there will be a success window as below, which has a tick box at the bottom to ‘Don’t show this message again’. Sadly, this tick box seems to do absolutely nothing as the window still pops up the next time even if the box has previously been ticked.
After some digging around in the registry, I have traced the problem to the fact it writes a registry entry when you tick the box, but the next time it checks if the box has been ticked before, a different non existent registry key is checked. Below are the registry entries that will stop the activation window appearing and also stop the success window from popping up again. Copy the text below into a notepad text file, and save as ‘yourname.reg’. Then double click the file to import into the registry. Works on current version 1.0.2.0.
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Softorino]
@=”success”
“cebe7d8a28c5ba83ba5497de5ca58ca04_Tweet”=”0″
If Task ForceQuit Pro didn’t have these nagging screen issues and the restart / shutdown buttons could be made a bit safer, it has the potential to be a very good little utility. With the registry entries above applied, it still makes a handy tool even though you have to take care with the bottom row of buttons.
Compatible with Windows 7, Vista and XP
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