Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
The Task Manager utility is a very handy tool for examining and managing all the apps and processes that are currently running on your Windows machine.
But if you’re searching for a specific task it can get a little tedious having to click the arrows one at time to expand each “branch” of the “tree” until you find the task you’re searching for.
Luckily, you don’t have to. [Read more…]
The native Windows Task Manager has long been the go-to utility when we need to see which programs are running on our PC or kill a “hung” process.
While Microsoft has really expanded the features and power of Task Manager in recent years, it still has some serious limitations.
Luckily, there’s an awesome replacement for the Windows’ Task Manager that you can download right now, and it won’t cost you a dime. [Read more…]
Rick’s Tech Tips Newsletter
A while back I wrote this blog post explaining how to use Chrome’s native Task Manager to find out which Chrome processes could be causing the browser to operate slower than it should.
That post received a lot of engagement, and several readers contacted me to ask if there is a native Task Manager built in to other browsers as well.
I answered those folks directly, but since I keep getting this same question I thought it might be a good idea to write a similar post to answer it on the blog. [Read more…]
Question from Anthony H: Rick, I have a favorite program that I’ve been using for many years, but they haven’t updated it since 2006 and it sometimes freezes up on me in Windows 7.
When the program freezes my mouse does too, and the only way to proceed is to unplug the power cable. I really don’t like doing that cause I’m afraid it’ll damage my PC. Is there any way to exit that program gracefully when it freezes using just the keyboard?
Rick’s answer: Hi Anthony. My first suggestion would be to ditch that old, no longer supported program and try to find a modern equivalent that won’t crash your computer when you use it. That being said, I understand completely why you’d rather not do that. In fact, I have a couple of programs on my Windows 7 PC that were released long before yours was and I won’t part with them until I absolutely have to!
To answer your question, there is indeed a way to “kill” a frozen program using just the keyboard. Follow these steps: [Read more…]