Every now and then, I have no choice but to close an unresponsive app on my PC. Usually, closing the app is enough, but sometimes a frozen app won’t respond to clicking the close button. In such cases, I usually force close the app by launching Task Manager. There are a couple of ways to do this, but it still takes some time to open Task Manager, find the offending processes, and then close them. Turns out there’s a much faster way to force close unresponsive apps in Windows 11.

Once that’s done, you can right-click on an app icon in your taskbar and select End Task to force the app to quit. That’s it! As a reminder, you shouldn’t use this option unless you’re forced to. If an app is responsive, using the regular close button (the X in the upper-right corner or the exit function built into your app) should work fine and you’re less likely to run into issues. Force quitting should only be used as a last resort, if you don’t want to worry about losing data.

There are a couple of alternate ways to open Task Manager and force quit apps in Windows 11. The easiest way is to press Ctrl-Shift-Esc on your keyboard, which will directly open Task Manager. Switch to the Processes tab, select the frozen app and click End Task to force it to quit. Alternatively, you can press Ctrl-Alt-Del, select Task Manager and follow the same steps. You can even open the Start menu and use the search bar to search for Task Manager.

Pranay Parab is an independent tech journalist based in Mumbai, India. He writes about tech for Lifehacker and specializes in tutorials and in-depth features.