A lot of people are surfing the internet and are download all different types of programs from many different sources. Now, this really isn't all that big of a problem as long as the places that you are downloading your software are from trusted websites. The main problem that this article is going to discuss is what to do when these programs hang.

The issue comes up when you are using a program and it stops responding by hanging. This can be a real buzz kill and can kill your level of productivity when you are working. So what can you do to prevent this? Kill the program (by kill I mean to stop it from running). By why do some programs hang on your computer and the same programs don't hand on other computers? Well the short answer is that it has to deal with your specific computers specifications and your computers exact problems. Sometimes when a program hangs, you will kill it and then Windows will then tell give you an error message. If you were to type that error message into Google (or any other search engine) you will get a description of the error as to why your computer hung.

I'm not going to go into the details of how to use these error messages to completely stop your computer from ever hanging again as that takes a lot of detective work and time, but what I am going to show you in this article is how to stop a program from hanging for a really long period of time by killing it.

There are 2 different, but yet similar ways that I'm going to show you here. To start just open up your task manager (Ctrl + Shift + Esc at the same time). What this will do is it will open up a window that will have a few tabs on it at the top of the screen. Now click on the tab that says "Application" and in there you will now see a list of the applications that are running with their current status. If there is an application that you think is "hanging" it will have a status that will say "Not Responding" under the area that is labled "status". What your going to want to do now is to click on the application so that it is highlighted and at the bottom of the windows just click on the small button that says "End Task". What this will do is it will kill the application. Now, keep in mind that if you have any unsaved work on your computer and you "end task" a program you will loose all of the unsaved data, so use this very cautiously.

Now, the second best way to kill an application is to simply right click on it when you are in the Applications tab of the Task Manager (remember Ctrl + Shift + Esc all at the same time) and click on Go To Process. This will then take you to the Process tab with the program highlighted. All you have to do now is to just right click on the program that is highlighted and click on the End Process Tree option. A bit of caution here: when you perform the End Process Tree option you are killing the program that is hanging and also the programs that are linked to it. Now, if the program that you want to kill either has unsaved work or is important you should not kill it as you might stop other programs that are linked to it from running. Keep this in mind at all times when you want to use this technique.