I'm doing some testing and frequently need to gracefully close all open apps either before running a program or rebooting. The batch file and PowerShell methods I've tried shut down chrome improperly, so I need to restore all open tabs. I want to simulate closing the app manually.
The main apps I typically have open are Chrome, Word, Titan Mail, Thunderbird, an image management program, Photoshop, possibly other Office or Adobe programs, and Notepad.
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We've all seen this happen. When you first buy a Windows PC, it seems to operate like a breeze. Programs open up and run with no difficulty.
Then after several months everything slows up. It becomes so bad that you have to buy a whole new computer. The assumption is there are some background processes that continue to run that prevent the computer from running more quickly. So how can you close all those background processes?
I know about opening the Task Manager. But there are usually so many processes running you can't tell which ones are essential for Windows to operate. I have tried shutting down some processes at random but I almost always get the warning "this is a system process and can't be shut down."
So can we shut down all those background processes so the computer is back to original pristine state and only the processes for the one program you want to run are operating?
The fastest native solution seems to be Win + Tab and then middle-click the Apps to close them.
The best 3rd party solution I found is 7+ Taskbar Tweaker. You can configure it to close Tasks by middle-click to the tasks entry immediately in the task bar. Unfortunately, Taskbar Tweaker seems to be tailor-fit very closely to Windows and broke with every major update (Anniversary, Creator). The maintainer each time fixed it within some weeks, but meanwhile everything defaults to the old behavior of opening new instances instead of closing old ones.
In my case, I simply open the task manager, then in the tab Application, I select the Apps to close, then I click the End task button.