Saturday, March 6, 2010

Windows tricks & tips- Restart without restarting

I’m not kidding, I really mean it. Yeah of course, you can restart Windows without restating your system. This trick is usefull especially when you are in a bad system crash. Sounds hard...?. Well I’ll explain it to you. The whole process is very easy & will complete in just 4 or 5 steps & is many times faster than a reboot. For fully understanding this trick you have to know some general details about Windows Operating System & Computer.
When we switch on a computer the BIOS will take control of the computer. It then looks in MBR (Master boot Record) & according to the codes in the MBR it finds a program called ‘boot loader’ & loads that into the computer’s RAM. The boot loader then loads essential Operating system files into the Computer’s RAM. In Windows it is ‘explorer.exe’,’ svhost.exe’, ‘winlogon.exe’, ‘services.exe’ etc. This process is called ‘booting’.
You know that, in ‘Windows’ every program opens in its own window & ‘explorer.exe’ controls all these windows i.e. it controls all the programs. So it is one of the main parts of a Windows OS. When a program stops working, it’ll affect ‘explorer.exe’. If it’s a major case, one program fault in ‘explorer.exe’ affects all other programs controlled by it. The result...? The ‘explorer.exe’ stops working. We say it as “System crashed” or “System hanged”. It stays as it is until we press ‘Reset button’. Reset button means rebooting your computer.
What will we do if we are in the middle of some important work that system crashed & we have no time for a rebooting? What will we do if the problem appears constantly? Or what will we do if we loaded a CD or DVD into the drive or connected an external storage device & Windows not recognizes it & we cannot open it, yet if the disc or the storage device is clean & free from errors? It is then this trick comes in handy.
First start ‘Task Manager’. Go to ‘Process’ tab & select ‘explorer.exe’. Right click on it & select ‘End Process Tree’ (By then all the windows & desktop icons will disappear, except Task Manager). Go to ‘File’ menu of the ‘Task Manager’ & select ‘New Task (Run...)’. Type ‘explorer.exe’ (Without the quotes) & press ENTER. Look, how quickly & easily the non responding programs have ended & desktop icons reappeared. We can also access our CD or DVD now. Our system is now fresh again without much the time consuming rebooting. That’s all. We have restarted our system so easily than ever.
If you wish to have more new cheats, Windows tricks & tips, hints, as soon as I finds it, or have any doubts, please feel free to mail me. My email: robinmathewrajan@yahoo.com. Those who wish to have more details about me can find me on ‘Face book’, ‘Orkut’ & ‘MySpace’.