I came across this small utility today while browsing through different blogs on the net. Its called CloseAll and it closes all open programs in Windows at once. There isn't much to it. Its a simple program that requires no install. Also you can easily point it out to the quick launch bar so you access it anytime using just a single click.
Why Should I Use It?
Although it doesn't do anything spectacular, I still recommend that everyone should have it. Why?? Here are some situations where you may find it useful.
- You try to install a program and it asks you to close all open programs. So you could just close all programs one by one or you could just click on this program and all open programs will be closed in less than a second.
- You have a lot of programs open at the same time and your windows starts to slow down. So much so that you could hardly move your mouse to the close button. Pretty rare but believe me this happens So you click on this program and within an instant your windows is up and running again.
- You have opened up a lot of programs at once and you just want to shut down your PC. So you are not really in the mood to close all those programs using the taskbar or clicking the cross button one by one so you click on this and task completed.
I could go on and on with this list but I hope you get my point.
How To Point Close All To Quick Launch Bar
- Right Click on the zip file you downloaded earlier and extract it
- Open the folder where you extracted the file
- Now just drag and drop the close all file to the quick launch bar. To drag it click on it and move your mouse to the quick launch bar as shown below.
Note 1: If you run a 64 bit windows operating system, make sure to choose the file present in the x64 folder
Note 2: If you can't see the quick launch bar in the taskbar, right click on the taskbar, click on toolbars and select quick launch from there
Advanced Options:
So what if you want to close all open programs except your browser(or anything else). You can manually add the programs you want to exclude. To do this follow these steps:
- First create a shortcut to the CloseAll program. Right click on the file and click on create shortcut
- Now right click on the shortcut you made and click on properties
- In the target window add the following commands at the end (-x="app-to-exclude.exe") without the brackets. Here "app-to exclude" should be replaced by the program you want excluded. For ex: type -x="chrome.exe" to exclude Google Chrome. Also you could add more than one program using the '|' seperator. For ex: -x="chrome.exe|notepad.exe|iexplore.exe"
Final Verdict:
To test how good this program is, I opened more than 20 applications at once with Close All setup in the quick launch. And I clicked on the program. It took 1-2 secs to close all the open programs. Pretty effective.
Note that it closes only the programs that are there on the taskbar. Tasks running in the background are not effected in any way. I highly recommend it to all of you. So did you try it out?? I would love to hear from you.
All Credit goes to Alexander Avdonin. from Ntwind
Thanks for reading...
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