What will you do when any program becomes non-responding? You would terminate that program from the task manager. This needs to open task manager by Alt+Ctrl+Del, wait for an endless time and manually abort the program which is not responding. A non-responding program clearly indicates that there is some problem with the program and your system interact more slowly than usual. This is a very common issue with the Windows operating systems.
Even, the task manager or ALT + F4 keys cannot close a program if it is hung or frozen in Windows operating systems (Windows XP, Windows 7, Windows 8). Here is some simple processes to automatically abort non-responding programs in Windows.
Related: Uninstall Useless Windows Components
How to Close Non-Responding Programs Automatically in Windows XP
You can kill non-responding programs automatically in Windows XP by a simple change in the registry file.
Click on Start menu > Run, type “regedit” and press the Enter key. This will open the registry editor.
Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Control Panel/Desktop from the left sidebar.
Find out the key named AutoEndTasks and double-click on it. This will open a new popup box. Change its default value zero to one, and click the ‘OK’ button.
The change will be effective after the next reboot of your system.
The above registry tweak enables your system to close the non-responding applications automatically. If you want to revert to previous state i.e you want to terminate non-responding programs manually, just change the value of ‘AutoEndTasks’ key to 0 (zero).
Important: Always keep a backup of your registry file before editing. Having problem with your old operating system? – Install Windows XP from USB.
How to Kill Programs Which are Not Responding in Windows 7, Windows 8
If you are a Windows 7 or Windows 8 user, you may not find the registry key that you modified earlier for Windows XP. But you can always terminate the programs that stopped responding with a single click.
Using TaskKill Utility
Create a shortcut to terminate non-responding programs instantly. Right-click on an empty space of the desktop and select New > Shortcut. Put the following command at where it asks for the location of the item.
taskkill.exe /f /fi "terminate non-responding programs"
Click the ‘Next’ button, give a suitable name for the shortcut and click ‘Finish’. Use this shortcut to kill any non-responding program in Windows 7 or Windows 8. The shortcut uses the TaskKill command which automatically identifies and kill the programs which do not respond.
There are some third-party tools which deal with frozen applications and kill them immediately. You can give this tool (Task Killer) or this tool (One Click App Killer) a try.
Are you sure this works ? I have tried this in XP sp2 and get error messages that says “Windows has recovered from a serious error”.
Have you tried this with closing the task manager and using anyother alternative ?