I’m sure there is a much better and more specific place to ask this, so please let me know if you can think of one. But i couldn’t, so I’m asking here for now. I have a program on Windows 10 (The game S.T.A.L.K.E.R Clear Sky via Steam incase somehow that matters.recently I’ve had this game freeze, and I can’t even get it closed with alt+F4. I know my OS is not entirely frozen because I can see the little window-switching animation when I use alt+tab. But the cursor is nowhere to be found, no matter what i do. After a few minutes, my game is a black screen on one of my monitors, and there is no way to free my cursor from its eternal damnation or even lay eyes on the little fella one last time

The question is: how else might i destroy a computer-wide problematic program, probably with only my keyboard.

I know it’s Windows, but there must be at least one other method that could work, right?

I typed this all while drunk so forgive any mistakes but goddammit i’m very curious what other solutions might be out there

    • Harold_Penisman@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
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      3 months ago

      Hmmm i knew that one but didnt think to try it because the mouse wasnt working. I just assumed that because I couldn’t switch the focused window with alt+tab, that opening another wouldn’t work either. But i also have task manager always open on one monitor so my situation could be different either way.

      Regardless, I pretty quickly fixed my game through means that have nothing to do with this topic, but because I asked the question and I’m genuinely curious, I’ll load my corrupted save and see what happens in a moment (it was a quicksave that couldnt be loaded without freezing shit basically)

    • SgtAStrawberry@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Just remember to set task manager to always on top before, I have tried this with some programs only to have task manager get stuck underneath the problem window.

  • slazer2au@lemmy.worldEnglish
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    3 months ago

    Do you have another window to take over the screen with ALT+Tab? I have noticed sometimes alt tab doesn’t work if there is no other window to switch to.

    Alt + enter will sometimes switch games from full screen to window mode so that may be an option.

    The other option is if you know the process name you can do Win+R to pull up the run box, likely behind the game, and type 𝚝𝚊𝚜𝚔𝚔𝚒𝚕𝚕 -𝚏 -𝚒𝚖 𝚙𝚛𝚘𝚌𝚎𝚜𝚜𝚗𝚊𝚖𝚎.𝚎𝚡𝚎

    That will kill the program.
    If those fail have you tried Win+Tab and launch a new desktop to kill the game via task manager.

    • Harold_Penisman@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
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      3 months ago

      Hell yeah I should’ve known this, i guess i’m just too drunk. That probably wouldve worked. The mouse wasnt working at all but CTRL+R CMD etc would have possibly worked (i solved my issue anyway but I’m still curious about it and I’ll try soon)

      • slazer2au@lemmy.worldEnglish
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        3 months ago

        It’s a STALKER game. You are bound to hit problems in the future. Those games were so damn buggy yet fun.

        • Harold_Penisman@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
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          3 months ago

          Ive been using one or two mods to patch most issues, but yeah, this type of thing could always happen. It’s was a pretty random one-off thing with one messed up quicksave, but the thought/question of the post interested me anyway