Sometimes you’ll get lucky and Windows will tell you that a program isn’t responding and give you some options to Close the program or End Now, or maybe even to Wait for the program to respond. Other times all you get is a Not Responding message in the program’s title bar and a full-screen gray-out, making it really clear that the program is going nowhere fast. Worst of all, some programs that freeze or lock up do so in a way that even your operating system can’t detect and inform you about, leaving you wondering if you have a problem with your mouse buttons or touchscreen. There are several ways to “force quit” a program in Windows.
Try to Close the Program Using ALT + F4
The little known but very handy ALT + F4 keyboard shortcut performs the same, behind the scenes, program-closing magic that clicking or tapping that X in the top-right of a program window does. Here’s how to do it: It’s super important that you do Step 1. If a different program or app is selected, that’s the program or app that’s in focus and will close. If no program is selected, Windows itself will shut down, although you’ll have a chance to cancel it before it happens (so don’t skip trying the ALT + F4 trick for fear of shutting off your computer). It’s equally important to tap the ALT key just once. If you hold it down, then as each program closes, the next one that comes to focus will close down, too. This will keep happening until all your programs are shut down and, ultimately, you’ll be prompted to shut down Windows. So, only tap the ALT key once to exit the one app or program that won’t close. Because ALT + F4 is identical to using the X to close an open program, this method of force-quitting a program is only helpful if the program in question is working to some degree, and it won’t work to close any other processes that this program “spawned” at any point since it started. That said, knowing this force-quit method can be particularly helpful if the batteries in your wireless mouse have quit, your touchscreen or touchpad drivers are making your life really difficult right now, or some other mouse-like navigation isn’t working as it should. Still, ALT + F4 takes just a second to try and is much easier to pull off than the more complicated ideas below, so we highly recommend you try it first, no matter what you think the source of the problem might be.
Use Task Manager to Force the Program to Quit
Assuming ALT + F4 didn’t do the trick, truly forcing an unresponsive program to quit—no matter what state the program is in—is best accomplished via Task Manager. Here’s how: That’s it! The program should have closed immediately but it could take several seconds if there were lots of child processes connected to the frozen program or the program was using a lot of system memory. This sounds a bit hard, but it’s not. The exact details do differ depending on your version of Windows, though. Windows 10 & 8: Find the program you want to force close in the Processes tab, listed in the Name column and probably under the Apps heading. Once found, right-click or tap-and-hold it and choose Go to details. If you don’t see the Processes tab, Task Manager might not be opened in full view. Choose More details at the bottom of the Task Manager window. Windows 7, Vista, & XP: Find the program you’re after in the Applications tab. Right-click it and then click Go To Process. This is a good thing — it means that not only will this individual program you want to be closed actually close, it means Windows will also end any processes that that program started, which are probably also hung up but much harder to track down yourself. See? Easy as pie…unless it didn’t work or you can’t get Task Manager to open. Here are a few more ideas if Task Manager didn’t do the trick:
Confuse the Program! (Prompting Windows to Step in and Help)
That’s probably not advice you’ve seen elsewhere, so let’s explain. In some cases, you can actually give a problematic program a little nudge off the cliff, so to speak, pushing it into a full-blown frozen state, sending a message to Windows that it should probably be terminated. To do this, do as many “things” as you can think to do in the program, even if they don’t do anything because the program is crashing. For example, click on menu items over and over, drag items around, open and close fields, try exiting half a dozen times—whatever you want, so long as you do them in the program you’re hoping to force quit. Assuming this works, you’ll get a window with a [program name] is not responding heading, usually with options like Check for a solution and restart the program, Close the program, Wait for the program to respond, or End Now (in older versions of Windows). Tap or click Close the program or End Now to do just that.
Execute the TASKKILL Command to…Kill the Task!
We have one last trick to force quit a program, but it’s an advanced one. A particular command in Windows, called taskkill, does just that—it kills the task you specify, completely from the command line. This trick is great in one of those hopefully rare situations where some kind of malware has prevented your computer from working normally, you still have access to Command Prompt, and you know the filename of the program you want to “kill.” Here’s how to do it:
How to Force-Quit Running Programs on Non-Windows Machines
Software programs and apps sometimes stop responding and won’t close on Apple, Linux, and other operating systems and devices, too. It’s certainly not a problem exclusive to Windows machines. A common method to open Command Prompt in all versions of Windows, even in Safe Mode, is via Run: open it with the WIN + R keyboard shortcut and then execute cmd. …replacing filename.exe with whatever filename the program you want to close is using. The /t option makes sure any child processes are closed as well, and the /f option forcefully terminates the process. If in the very rare situation that you don’t know the filename, but do know the PID (process ID), you can execute taskkill like this instead: …replacing, of course, processid with the actual PID of the program you want to force quit. A running program’s PID is most easily found in Task Manager. On a Mac, force quitting is best done from the Dock or via the Force Quit option from the Apple menu. You can also hit the Command + Option + Escape key combination to bring up a Force Quit Applications window. In Linux, the xkill command is one really easy way to force quit a program. Open a terminal window, type it, and then click the open program to kill it. There’s more on this in our list of Linux Terminal Commands That Will Rock Your World. In ChromeOS, open Task Manager using SHIFT + ESC and then select the program you want to terminate, followed by the End process button. To force quit an app on iPad and iPhone devices, double-press the Home button, find the app you want to close, and then swipe it up as if you’re tossing it right off the device. Android devices have a similar process: swipe up from the bottom of the screen and then swipe the unresponding app up even further, off the screen. Or, for some Android devices, tap the square multitasking button, find the app that’s not responding, and then toss it off the screen…left or right.
