The fastest way to close all running programs in Windows

With just a handful of keystrokes you can shut down all active apps on your system via Task Manager’s Programs tab. Plus: power off your PC by pressing three keys.

Need to shut down your PC in a hurry? Simple. Here are two handy keyboard shortcuts to save you time and mousing.

Close all open programs
A little-known set of keystrokes will shut down all active programs at once in no time.

Press Ctrl-Alt-Delete and then Alt-T to open Task Manager’s Applications tab. Press the down arrow, and then Shift-down arrow to select all the programs listed in the window. When they’re all selected, press Alt-E, then Alt-F, and finally x to close Task Manager.

For those of you keeping score at home, that’s seven steps that can be accomplished in less than 10 seconds.

If you’re concerned about having to remember these or other shortcut keys, press the Alt key to show the underline beneath the letter to press to activate each option.

There’s more than one way to turn off your PC
At the end of a long workday your last official act may be to press the power button on your PC to turn it off. Alternatively, you can click Start > Shut down.

But there’s a way to power off your system without taking your hands off the keyboard: in Windows 7, press the Windows key, then the right-arrow key, and then Enter; in Vista, press the Windows key, then the right arrow three times, and then u; in XP, press the Windows key and then u twice.

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Windows will prompt you to save any files that require it before closing the host app, just as it does when you press the power button or click «Shut down» on the Start menu (which is an odd place for a «Shut down» button, if you ask me).

Equal time for Mac users: open the shutdown dialog by pressing Control-Eject; activate sleep mode by pressing Option-Command-Eject; close all applications and restart the machine by pressing Control-Command-Eject (you’ll be prompted to save changes to open documents); close all applications and shut down by pressing Control Option-Command-Eject (once again, you’ll be prompted to save changes to open documents).

Keep in mind that some organizations want you to leave your PC running because updates and backups may be scheduled for the middle of the night. You can set the power button to put your system in hibernate or standby mode via Windows’ Power Options.

To open Power Options, press the Windows key, type «power options,» and press Enter. Click «Choose what the power buttons do» in the left pane, click the menu next to «When I press the power button» and make your selection: Shut down, Hibernate, Sleep, or Do nothing.

Windows 7’s Power Options dialog lets you change the power button’s action from the default «Shut down» to either «Hibernate,» «Sleep,» or «Do nothing.» screenshot by Dennis O’Reilly/CNET

(If Windows seems to take forever to turn off your PC, check out my post from March 2008 titled » Shut down Windows in an instant .»)

How to Force-Quit a Program in Windows

Here’s how to close a program in Windows that isn’t responding

Ever try to close a program in Windows but tapping or clicking on that big X doesn’t do the trick?

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.

The instructions in this article apply to Windows 10, 8, 7, Vista, and XP.

Regardless of what program won’t close, or what the specific situation is, there are several ways to «force quit» a program in Windows:

Though they might seem related, many of the methods for forcing a software program to close aren’t the same as unlocking a locked file. See our article What Is a Locked File? for more information on doing that.

Need to force-uninstall a program instead of just shut it down? IObit Uninstaller is the best software uninstaller for the job.

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:

Bring the program you want to quit to the foreground by tapping or clicking on it.

If you’re having trouble doing this, try ALT + TAB and progress through your open programs with the TAB key (keep ALT down) until you reach the program you want (then let go of both).

Press and hold one of the ALT keys.

While still holding the ALT key down, press F4 once.

Let go of both keys.

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.

Open Task Manager using the CTRL + SHIFT + ESC keyboard shortcut.

If that doesn’t work or you don’t have access to your keyboard, right-click or tap-and-hold on the Desktop taskbar and choose Task Manager or Start Task Manager (depending on your version of Windows) from the pop-up menu that appears.

Next, you want to find the program or app that you want to close and get Task Manager to direct you to the actual process that supports it.

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.

You may be tempted to simply End task directly from that pop-up menu, but don’t. While this might be perfectly fine for some programs, doing this «the long way» as we’re describing here is a much more effective way to force quit a program (more on this below).

Right-click or tap-and-hold the highlighted item you see and choose End process tree.

You should be in the Details tab if you’re using Windows 10 or Windows 8, or the Processes tab if you’re using Windows 7, Windows Vista, or Windows XP.

Click or tap End process tree in the warning that appears. In Windows 10, for example, this warning looks like this:

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.

Close Task Manager.

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.

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:

Open Command Prompt. There’s usually no need for it to be elevated, and any method you use to get it open is fine.

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.

Execute the taskkill command like this:

. 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.

The program or app that you force-quit via taskkill should end immediately and you should see one of these responses in Command Prompt: ​

If you get an ERROR response that says that a process was not found, check that the filename or PID you used with the taskkill command was entered correctly.

The first PID listed in the response is the PID for the program you’re closing and the second is usually for explorer.exe, the program that runs the Desktop, Start Menu, and other major user interface elements in Windows.

If even taskkill doesn’t work, you’re left with having to restart your computer, essentially a force-quit for every program running. including Windows itself, unfortunately.

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.

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.