The Secret Easy Way to Restart Explorer in Vista. And the harder XP way…

We have all had instances where our machine was not responding nor willing to do our bidding. Back in the day you had to open the task manager and kill the task explorer. Sometimes you had to restart Explorer manually from the run menu and sometimes this whole process took way too long – especially if your machine is having problems.

The boys in Redmond have put a new keyboard combo shortcut that allows you to exit and restart explorer in one swift motion.

1. Click your blue orb or hit the windows key to bring up your Start menu.
2. Hold down the Ctrl and Shift keys at the same time.
3. Right-click on an empty area of the menu
4. Click on the new available choice called “Exit Explorer”

Apparently you can do this on XP as well just not as easily:

In Windows XP, you can get Explorer to exit cleanly by getting to the shutdown dialog (e.g., Start / Turn Off Computer, or Start/Shutdown), then hold down the Ctrl+Alt+Shift keys and click the “Cancel” button. (Ref: JeffDav’s blog.)

Pretty nifty guys! Geeky thanks to Sam from Wisconsin for sending this one in! He scored himself some AskTheAdmin swag!

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