It has happened to everyone at some point. We are using a program on our computer and suddenly it stops responding; it has become “stuck”, and this can mean two things: either it will work again after a while, or it will stop working. There are already methods to close any Windows program, but they usually involve using the Task Manager.
For many users, this is too complicated, but it is the only option. What many people don’t know is that when you press the “X” button while closing a program, a lot of things happen in the background.
The program may want to save data before closing, for example; or you may be in the middle of an important task and cannot close it until you have completed it. Or, in the worst case, a “bug” may cause the program to stop responding and, as a result, Completely ignore the user when they press the “X”.
Although Windows 11 has improved a lot in managing programs that remain “stuck”, at least compared to previous generations of the system, it is still not perfect. The good news is that there is a method to close programs directly and without waiting.
This is called “Complete Task”and it’s an option that appears when you right-click on a program in the taskbar. The problem is that for some reason Microsoft decided to keep this option “hidden” and most people don’t know about it.
Therefore, to begin with, we must enable this option. To do this, we must open the Windows settings and, on the left, we enter the “System” section. Here, Click on “For Programmers”and a new section will open.
This is where you’ll find the options that, as the name suggests, are usually only useful to programmers. The option we’re interested in is called ‘End Task’, and we just need to enable it.
Now, if we right-click on any of the icons on the taskbar, we will see a new option called “End task”; it can also be called “End all tasks” if there are several related to the same program. If we click here, it will be different from clicking on “Close window”; we will send a direct order to end the process, which the program will not be able to refuse.
Therefore, we must be very careful with this option, because we can lose our data if we use it; For example, if we use it, the program will not be saved before closing, so the files, information, images and everything we do in the program will be lost forever if they have not been saved before.