How to automatically terminate hung program in Windows XP
Many a times, programs like Office, Winamp and others, in Windows XP, get hung / Not Responding and clicking on close button just doesn’t work. Even the task manage “End program” feature fails or takes too much of time. Bill Gates made XP but then he didn’t tell us all. Here is a small trick which you can use to Auto Kill the programs which it gets hung or goes into status of “Not Responding”
Steps to set auto kill not responding programs
- Backup your registry first.
- Go to Run and enter “Regedit“.
- Browse to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop
- Here you will find a string called as “Auto End Task“, set its value to “1” by double clicking it. This means any hung program will be killed instantaneously.
- Now suppose if you want to give some time, as some programs come back to normal in few minutes, Find a key called as “WaitToKillAppTimeout“, change the value to the value you want. You have to enter value in milliseconds though.
See the image for a clear view of what you are going to do
If anything goes wrong, use your backed up registry to get back to normal.!!! Check out more tricks on XP Twekas
Posted on 25th August 2007 by Ashish Mohta , A Professional Tech blogger, Editor and Writer who talks about solving day to day problems of people who use computer. He also writes on How to use the applications like Office, PC tips, Online tools,Browsers and more. All posts by Ashish Mohta | Connect with me @ Twitter | Linkedin | Facebook | Stumble
Hi,
hi bro i m quite inspired by the way u communicate, its very binding and makes sense to begginers like myself who dont understand such techi terms carry on with ur passion and help others by your knowledge and expertise…..thanks
This is fantastic! I’ve been looking for a way to kill mysqld-nt.exe for months. Simple and concise instructions. Thanks!
This will really help, most of the times programs hang and we no option just to sit and wait for the application to terminate. This happens esp with winamp or windows media player.
Hi.. Is this method works whenever there is a non responsive program or only during the shut down process?
Tried it on my PC but it doesn’t kill the program when it hung.
Nope should work when any program gets hung for a long time. I had seen it working. Did you specify the timeout ?
You know, when you hit CTRL+ALT+DEL, it brings up the task manager, usually on the applications tab. If you hit the “processes” tab, you can see the filenames of all of your applications being run. If you know the name of it, you can right click, End Process. That works for me every time, even when just highlighting it at the Applications Tab and hitting the “End Process” button doesn’t work. Its done it every time.
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