August 9, 2004
I Said Reboot
Windows has been pissing me off lately. You too? The more I use my Mac laptop for work, the more I appreciate the little things Apple has done. Here is one.
On my Windows XP box, I have processes that hang when I shutdown. Lately, it has been the Bluetooth service that always hangs. I don’t know why. Probably should figure that out. Regardless, when I tell Windows that I want to reboot, I want it to reboot. It is frustrating when you tell it to reboot, then you leave and you come back 15 minutes later and Windows is stuck on some dumb process “not responding” error. I said reboot…I don’t care! On the Mac, they have this nice timer that forces a reboot after a few minutes. Apple understands the fact that if you tell it to reboot and you leave, you probably wanted it to reboot and not sit there and wait for you.
I found plenty of custom shutdown programs out there that did something similar but I don’t want some special task tray icon I have to click. I wanted it built right in to Windows and the normal shutdown mechanism.
Well, some googling and I found a solution for Windows. A simple registry tweak. Just change HKCU\Control Panel\Desktop\AutoEndTasks to 1 and Windows will not show the “End Task” dialog anymore.
Thank god…on to the next Windows annoyance.
