Windows 11 and Windows 10 have plenty of annoying default settings, but none are worse than the operating system’s refusal to kill unresponsive tasks when you choose to shut down or restart them. By default, if a single program, even a simple background program, refuses to shutdown or claims to have unsaved data, the operating system will throw an error message giving you the opportunity to cancel shutdown or force the shutdown. program. applications by pressing “Restart anyway” or “Shut down anyway”.
In theory, this is a good security feature for people who are distracted by saving their work. Perhaps you had an important document open in Notepad, went to reboot to install an update, and forgot to save your work beforehand. This prompt would give you a chance to go back to the Windows desktop, save your file, and then start the restart again.
However, in reality, there are a lot of applications that refuse to close automatically; I’ve even seen peripheral control software do this. So he ends up selecting restart, walking away from the computer for a few minutes while he waits for it to do its thing (perhaps running a Windows update) and then coming back to see that his PC is still waiting for his permission to restart. Give me a break!
Fortunately, it’s easy to fix this problem by editing the Windows registry. There are a few different settings you can tweak to change the amount of time Windows waits to kill a hanging app, but the most important thing to do is set HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\AutoEndTasks to 1. We’ll follow this step. -a step below.
How to end tasks automatically in Windows 11 or 10
1. Open the registry editor. To get there, search for “regedit” and click on the top result. Click yes if you are asked for permission.
2. Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop.
3. Create a string value called AutoEndTasks if it doesn’t already exist. To create a string value, right-click in the right pane and select New->String Value. Then rename the one you create to AutoEndTasks.
4. Set AutoEndTasks to 1. You can do this by double clicking on it and setting the number to 1.
5. Add the following optional strings to speed up the shutdown time.
- WaitToKillAppTimeout: The amount of time Windows waits before killing an open application. The default value is 20,000 milliseconds (20 seconds), but you can set it to 2,000 (2 seconds) to reduce the wait time.
- HungAppTimeout: The amount of time Windows waits for an unresponsive application to close. The default value is 5000 milliseconds, but you can reduce it to 2000.
6. Set WaitToKillServiceTimeout to 2,000 in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control if you want to speed up the Windows timeout for unresponsive services.
7. close record and restart your pc.
From now on, Windows should wait just a couple of seconds before force-quitting your apps on shutdown. So make sure you’ve actually saved any work you want to keep.
To change another annoying Windows default setting that slows you down, see how to disable Windows web search.
