mvncnt/blog

A Tip on how to take effect a new installation on Vista/XP without rebooting.

When we install a new program in a computer, sometimes it is needed to restart the computer in order for the new program to become effective and running properly. Restarting a 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.