Restart the system without Restarting

I had a teacher show me this back in college while doing a install of Windows XP and had to restart. Instead of restarting the system he had us go to Run and type in a command or a some program that refreshed the system so that we didn't have to restart. Does anyone know what I'm talking about?

 

I think you might mean restarting the explorer.exe process. This is probably safer and easier than messing around in the registry (although, if you do go that route, make sure you have a good backup, and you'll be fine!). To do this, please do the following:

1. Hit ctrl+shift+esc
2. Highlight explorer.exe
3. Press the 'End Process' button.
4. When promted, confirm the termination by clicking 'Yes'
5. From the 'File' menu, choose 'New Task'
6. Type 'Explorer' (without the quotes)
7. Press enter (or click 'OK')

This will close any open explorer windows, and the desktop. Restarting the process will bring back the desktop, but not any open windows. This is often very handy in cases where explorer starts to drag (ie searching a network drive).

 

It can also be done from the command line:

Code:

taskkill /F /IM explorer.exe && explorer

This can be entered at the command line, or copied into notepad and saved as filename.bat, and you would have a batch file that did this for you automatically!

 

Thanks TimW I'll give that a try. Although it seemed like it was something alot easyer.


Ah, good idea thanks.