Windows XP for Starters: The Missing Manual: Exactly What You Need to Get Started

5.4. When Programs Die

Windows XP itself may be a revolution in stability (at least if you're used to Windows Me), but that doesn't mean that programs never crash or freeze. They crash, all rightit's just that in XP, you rarely have to restart the computer as a result.

When something goes horribly wrong with a program, your primary interest is usually exiting it in order to get on with your life. But when a program locks up (the cursor moves, but menus and tool palettes don't respond) or when a dialog box tells you that a program has "failed to respond," exiting may not be so easy. After all, how do you choose File Exit if the File menu itself doesnt open ?

As in past versions of Windows, the solution is to invoke the "three-fingered salute": Ctrl+Alt+Delete. What happens next depends on whether or not your PC is part of a domain network (Section 2.1):

  • Part of a domain . Ctrl+Alt+Delete summons the Windows Security dialog box. Click the Task Manager button. The Applications tab on the resulting dialog box, shown in Figure 5-2, provides a list of every open program. Furthermore, the Status column should make clear what you already know: that one of your programs is ignoring you.

  • Part of a workgroup (or not networked) . You save a step. Ctrl+Alt+Delete brings you directly to the Windows Task Manager dialog box (Figure 5-2).

Figure 5-2. As if you didn't know, one of these programs is "not responding." Highlight its name and then click End Task (indicated by the cursor) to slap it out of its misery. As described in the box on Section 5.4, you also get a chance to tell Microsoft it messed up.

Tip: You can also run Task Manager by right-clicking the taskbar and then selecting Task Manager from the shortcut menu. Doing this bypasses the Windows Security dialog box and brings you directly to Windows Task Manager, with the Applications tab selected. Or just press Shift+Ctrl+Alt+Delete.
UP TO SPEED

Sending an Error Report to Microsoft

Whenever Windows XP discovers that you have terminated one program or another in some eccentric wayfor example, by using the Task Manager (see Figure 5-2)a dialog box that says, "Please tell Microsoft about this problem" appears.

If you click the Send Error Report button, your PC connects to the Internet and sends an email report back to Microsoft, the mother ship, providing the company with the technical details about whatever was going on at the moment of the freeze, crash, or premature termination. (To see exactly what information you're about to send, click the " click here " link.)

Microsoft swears up and down that it doesn't do anything with this information except to collate it into gigantic electronic databases, which it then analyzes using special software tools. The idea, of course, is to find trends that emerge from studying hundreds of thousands of such reports . "Oh, my goodness, it looks like people who own both Speak-it Pro 5 and Beekeeper Plus who right-click a document that's currently being printed experience a system lockup ," an engineer might announce one day. By analyzing the system glitches of its customers en masse, the company hopes to pinpoint problems and devise software patches with much greater efficiency than before.

If you're worried about privacy, click Don't Send (or press Enter) each time this happens. (On the other hand, if you're truly concerned about privacy and Windows XP, this particular feature is probably the least of your worries.)

Shutting down the troublesome program is fairly easy; just click its name and then click the End Task button. (If yet another dialog box appears, telling you that "This program is not responding," click the End Now button.)

When you jettison a recalcitrant program this way, Windows XP generally shuts down the troublemaker gracefully, even offering you the chance to save unsaved changes to your documents.

If even this treatment fails to close the program, you might have to slam the door the hard way. Click the Processes tab, click the name of the program that's giving you grief , and then click the End Process button. (The Processes list includes dozens of programs, including many that Windows XP runs behind the scenes. Finding the abbreviated short name of the program may be the hardest part of this process.) You lose any unsaved changes to your documents using this methodbut at least the frozen program is finally closed.

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