Today's stupid nerd trick.

[theweaselking]

Killing a task from the command line on windows.

If, for example, you've got a fullscreen app that's somehow grabbed the screen topmost but not necessarily focus, and frozen, and WILL NOT release it, but other apps are responding and you can, say, see them under Peek and use the start menu, etc? But you can't get any other window to actually appear on the screen where you can click on them?

(That situation is not as hypothetical as you might believe. Repeatable, even.)

Well then, open Task Manager with ctrl-alt-del and use peek to see the name of the frozen application, open an elevated command prompt with start ->cmd-> Run As Administrator, and then type, blind, "taskkill /im [name]" and press enter. This will kill the stupid goddamn application that won't come back and won't go away.

Comments

[argonel.livejournal.com]

I will have to file that for future need. Is there a specific recent game that is requiring this or is this just for general knowledge?

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

There's a specific game (Neverwinter) that sometimes, on my laptop, hangs in that specific way.

[pappy-legba.livejournal.com]

Does that game have a standard windowed mode? There are a couple apps that take standard windowing and turn it into window-noborder mode.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

It has a windowed mode, and a windowed (no border) mode, but this is a specific kind of crash/hang of the fullscreen mode, on a specific set of hardware (meaning, it doesn't happen on other machines).

It's a nuisance, nothing more. But it happens often enough that "how to kill it, blind" is a good trick to have.

[pappy-legba.livejournal.com]

Ah. I assumed that windowed-noborder is the default preference of most, but this seems not to be the case. You have reasons for preferrring straight-up fullscreen mode.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

It works better, for this game, on this PC. Basically. Getting it to work at all without annoying graphical glitches and hangs and crashes (that also affect other games using the same client) was a pain in the butt caused by a change earlier in the year. So once I've got a "works every time" setting, I stick with it. Occasionally, while alt-tabbing to a different window, it crashes in this way.

None of these problems affect my desktop. It really is a laptop-hardware-specific thing. Some other people with similar laptops report similar problems, but fixes for oddities affecting a small number of users on a small subset of PCs where they have a working workaround are not high priorities for the developers.

[resonant.livejournal.com]