Tips of How to Take Effect After Installation Without Restarting Windows XP/Vista
When we install a new program in computer, sometimes it is needed to restart the computer in order for the new program to become effective and running properly. Restarting computer could be irritating and frustrating especially if you are in the middle of doing your work and have lot of applications currently running simultaneously. You may need to stop your work, save and close all documents and applications before restarting the PC. Don’t worry, now there is a way to make the program effective even without the need to restart computer after the installation.
You can achieve this by restarting Explorer instead of restarting whole windows. To restart Explorer, you can follow the traditional way by going to task manager, then go to Processes tab and sort applications by clicking on Image Name column. Look for explorer.exe and kill all of them by clicking End Process button. Alternatively, to make the steps simple, copy below commands as below into notepad and save it as KillExplorer.bat
@echo off
taskkill /f /IM explorer.exe
explorer.exe
Execute KillExplorer.bat batch file will kill all the running explorer.exe in Windows within few seconds. Hope this tips will keep your current tasks running without being interrupted by unnecessary system restart.
For user who want to use just mouse click and keyboard press without typing too many keys, try the trick to exit and kill Explorer cleanly.
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Entries (RSS)
February 13th, 2009 18:13
[...] for Explorer.exe under Processes tab, then right clicking on it and select End Process, or using Taskkill command. This actually involves few steps in killing only a single Explorer.exe. If you have multiple [...]
October 14th, 2008 12:23
I have to agree with Razor on this one. This may work in certain situations, but if this was true, we would have heard about it long before.
October 11th, 2008 13:37
This article is, quite frankly, bad advice. Killing explorer.exe merely is killing the front-end shell to Windows. This does not shutdown and restart the many kernel-mode executables, services and drivers that are generally involved in the type of installations and changes requiring a restart.
There simply is not a way to shut down those without doing a true restart.
October 11th, 2008 01:54
There is a hidden GUI in Windows XP/Vista (who knows why MS decided to keep it hidden) to restart Explorer.
jeff’s WebLog : how to cleanly start and stop explorer.exe:
http://blogs.msdn.com/jeffdav/archive/2004/07/22/191636.aspx
Restart Explorer.exe process cleanly in Windows Vista:
http://www.winhelponline.com/blog/how-to-terminate-and-restart-explorerexe-process-cleanly/
October 11th, 2008 01:21
That was “Did you find…” I’m not English as you can read!
October 11th, 2008 01:19
Did you found that one with 2001’s google? =)
Really old tip but a reminder never hurts.
It also works with some registry modifications affecting the explorer, the desktop,…
October 11th, 2008 00:21
Be careful, some tray icons may disappear by restarting explorer.exe !