Shut Down an Unresponsive Program

Sometimes when you’re working on your computer an application might freeze up. You might not be able to do anything with it and clicking the mouse or pressing a key on the keyboard will have no effect. In this situation we typically say that the program has crashed as it is unresponsive.

When this happens you generally won’t be able to close the application the usual way so you will need to force it to close even though, in doing so, you will lose any unsaved work. Here’s how:




Hold the Ctrl and Alt keys on the keyboard and tap the Delete key once. Be careful to do this only once! When the onscreen menu appears, choose Start Task Manager to open the Windows Task Manager.





Select the Applications tab and right click the name of the program that has stopped running. Choose End Task and the program will be closed automatically for you. You can then close the Task Manager window and restart your program.