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While working with too many programs in Windows, you must have encountered the famous dialog box “This program is not responding”. After this dialog box is shown, the desktop freezes for a while and may be the screen goes black. Next, you are shown an option to end the program, clicking which terminates the program and brings some life in Windows.

What causes this temporary system hog is the lack of resources requested. May be your system is low on random access memory (RAM) and you are requesting a large number of commands, which sadly your system can’t execute in such a small interval of time

Now, what if the desktop enters into a continuous loop where more than one program is not responding. One of the common examples is Firefox and Microsoft Office used in parallel, you open too many tabs or documents and both the programs stop responding.

In such cases you have to open Windows task manager by pressing “Control + Alt+ Del” and manually end the process(s). Why not use alternative ways to kill all the non responsive programs in one shot. This can save time and CPU resources and moreover, you can start your work afresh.

In this tutorial we will learn how to close all the non responsive programs in Windows without using the Task manager.
Kill Non Responsive programs With a Desktop Shortcut
1. First you will have to create a new desktop shortcut in Windows, double clicking the shortcut will kill all the non responding processes at once. Simply right click on any empty area of Windows desktop and select New -> Shortcut
2. Enter the following line in the desktop shortcut wizard
taskkill /F /FI "STATUS eq NOT RESPONDING"
3. Hit “Next” and give the shortcut a name of your choice. Hit “Finish” and you are done

You will see a new desktop shortcut placed in the desktop. To recognize it better, right click the shortcut and choose “Properties”. Then hit the “Change Icon” button under the “Shortcut” tab and select a custom icon for the shortcut you just created.
While the last step isn’t mandatory, assigning an icon to the shortcut makes sure you recognize it when some programs stop responding.
Kill Non Responsive programs From Right Click Context Menu
Another smart way of killing all non responsive programs is to add a context menu entry. This is more useful, because you don’t have to search for the Kill all programs shortcut in the desktop. Following are the steps involved:


1. Type regedit in the run command dialog box or in the search box of Windows start menu. This will open the Windows registry editor

2. Find the following key

Windows 7: HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\DesktopBackground\Shell
Windows Vista: HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\Background\Shell
3. Right click on the Shell folder from the left pane and select New -> Key
4. Give the key a relevant name e.g “Kill all tasks”. Now right click on this key again and create another sub key, this time name it as command.
5. Select the command key in the left pane and double click the default entry in the right pane. Enter the value data as: taskkill /F /FI "STATUS eq NOT RESPONDING"
6. You are all done. Right click on any empty area of the desktop and you will see a new context menu entry as “Kill all tasks”

Later if you want to delete the context menu entry, simply navigate to the corresponding key and delete thecommand sub-key, as created in step 4.

Do you know of any other trick which can automatically kill all non responsive programs in Windows? Share your ideas in the comments section.