Looking for a free Windows utility that will allow you to quickly close all programs currently running in Windows? This can be very useful, for example, if you need to close all running programs before installing a new application. I find this quite annoying, because I usually have 10 different apps open and I have to manually close them one by one and then reopen them after installing my program.
How do I stop programs running in the background in Windows 10?
That's where two free utilities make the process a lot easier. Close All and SmartClose are about the only two programs that perform this action well. Close All seems to do a better job of closing all applications than SmartClose, but SmartClose has a nice feature that lets you restore the applications you previously closed. You should try both and decide which one works best for you.
Close All is a very simple program and doesn't try to do anything too ambitious, except close as many apps as possible. It's also a newer program and therefore supports 32 and 64 bit Windows. Once you install and run it, it will show you a list of all running programs.
By default, all apps are selected, but you can deselect an app if you don't want to close it. Just click OK and you're done! For testing purposes, I opened about 10-15 programs on a Windows 7 PC and using Close All was able to close them all. Obviously, you have a variety of applications running on your computer and your results may vary, but Close All does the best job of closing the most apps.
