What's the side effects of constantly ending processes through ctrl + alt + del? [closed]

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I always feel guilty when I end a process in the task manager, thinking to myself that if there was a microsoft developer behind me he'd probably say 'if you only knew what you're doing..' . So, is it that bad to kill processes or actually it's something that don't have relevant collateral damages at all? Thanks!

Answer 1

It depends on what you're killing, really.

If that process has created some temp files, they aren't going to get cleaned up. If the process was in the middle of writing to a file, the file will be incomplete.

I wouldn't worry about the side effects from killing a frozen notepad.exe. But if it is something like VMWare Workstation, then yes, I would worry because my VM might be corrupted.

Answer 2

I'd have to second the answer of 'it depends'. A large percentage of programs out there won't cost you much more than whatever you were doing at the time of the kill. With that said, there are other programs that could suffer significant damage depending on when you kill it. It all depends on what the application is doing, what kind of temp/state/etc files/data it's using at the time, etc.

With all that said, I wouldn't think 'death by task manager' would be all that common of an activity. Sure there are programs that go south off and on, but I'm rarely pushed to having to kill a process of with that kind of force...