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If your computer suddenly locks up, the culprit might be an unresponsive program. To see if any programs running on your computer are unresponsive you will need to open up the task manager.

To open the Task Manager using the keyboard press the CTRL, ALT, and DEL key simultaneously.

To open the Task Manager using the mouse, right-click on the taskbar and select "Task Manager" from the pop-up menu.

Once you have task manager open click on the "Applications" tab. This will give you a list of programs currently running on your computer. If a program is unresponsive it will say "not responding" in the status column. You will need to end any unresponsive program. To do this simply select the unresponsive program and click the "End Task" button. You may need to end more than one unresponsive program.

If there are no programs listed under the "Applications" tab then you may want to check the "Processes" tab. You will see a lot of processes listed here. Many of these should not be ended so make sure you recognize a process name before ending it. Some major culprits to look for include winword,exe, outlook.exe, and iexplore.exe (note the i, iexplore is Internet Explorer, explore is a Windows process that should not be ended).

If ending processes and applications does not un-freeze your computer or you cannot get the task manager to open your computer will need to be rebooted. In some cases the only thing you can do is turn the computer off, wait about a minute and turn it back on.

Learn more about this author, Katherine Bennett.
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