Close all open programs with one click: Close All

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Wednesday, April 14, 2010 Leave a Comment

You are in front of your office PC having 20-30 windows open and everything messed up… You are called for an emergency… Urghh…What to do now?? UseClose All.

This little tool lets you to close all running applications with just one click. It doesn’t use system resources because it only flashes a ‘close’ signal to all open windows on the desktop and then ceases.

Just create a shortcut to the tool in the Start Menu, Quick Launch, Windows 7 Taskbar or elsewhere.

You can always add a hotkey to this shortcut. It is really very handy if you are running ~20 applications and want them all to quit instantly. It works just as if you were pressing the close button for each application.

How To Install

Close All Windows is a very simple utility that doesn’t require installation. No settings are stored in the Windows Registry or file system. Just follow the steps below to set it up on your computer.

Download the ZIP archive and extract it somewhere on your hard drive.
Open the extracted folder, right-click CloseAll.exe and choose Send To -> Desktop (create shortcut) from the context menu.
Switch to the Desktop and rename the created shortcut to “Close All” or whatever you want.
Now you can drag this shortcut to the Quick Launch Bar or to the Windows 7 Taskbar for quick access.

Advanced Options

If you want to prevent certain applications from being to be closed by Close All, you can add a simple exclusion list to the CloseAll.exe command line.

Right-click the shortcut and choose Properties from the context menu:
Go to the Shortcut tab, Target and add -x="app-to-exclude.exe":

You can separate multiple values with “|” (pipe), example:

-x="explorer.exe|firefox.exe|msnmsgr.exe"

Click OK to save the shortcut properties. Remember, you'd better test it before using it!

Download – CloseAll.zip (18 KB)

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