Shutting it down occasionally resets everything and will usually drastically improve your computing experience. Just as Windows installations degrade over time, Windows sessions do too.

When it restarts, the problem will usually be fixed. Close the program if you can and then shut down the computer using the shutdown command in Windows. Once the problem is figured out and the program responds again, don’t continue working. If what you’re doing is really important, it’s best to let Windows figure out the problem. As I said earlier, sometimes it can take as long as 20 minutes to respond. When a program freezes up, often times it is not permanently frozen. How important is this document? How much time do you have to deal with this problem? The answer to these questions will determine how you will deal with the problem. Have you saved the file recently (you should save important files frequently!) This is the time to ask yourself a few questions. Suddenly everything stops and nothing inside Word will work. You click on print and then try to change the printer settings. You’ve been working on a very important 200 page document. What that means is sometimes we need to be very patient. I’ve also had seemingly stuck programs take that long to respond. I’ve seen it take 10 to 20 minutes before. It can also cause information to be lost and your Windows installation to degrade over time.Īlways try to shut down a non-responsive or frozen program before hitting the power button and shutting the computer down.Īnother thing to keep in mind is th at this process of stopping a program can sometimes take a long time. This can leave files in an open state instead of being closed in an orderly manner. It’s also not good for your computer to be shut down in the middle of running something. It can take many minutes to start Windows back up though. It usually only takes a few moments to stop a program. That being said however, it still works quite often and can save you a lot of time. They also have many more instances of the entire computer freezing up. Windows computers generally have more instances of programs freezing up. Unfortunately, this does not usually work as well on a Windows computer as it does on a MAC. Today we’re going to look at how to do it in Windows.Ĭlick here to read the MAC version of this article. Last week’s article was about how to do this on a MAC. It seems no matter how sophisticated our computers get, we still have to deal with unresponsive or frozen programs.

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