How to turn off a PC that has stopped responding or hanged

Sometimes your PC hangs completely and you are not able to even turn it off. Whatever may be the reason - some malfunctioning software, defective hardware problem, overheating or buggy device drivers, it can be pretty intimidating if your PC just hangs and you don't know how to recover. On desktop PC cases, there is the Reset button to restart but if you do not have the reset button (a very common situation for most modern mobile PCs, tablets and laptops), you may wonder how to get a PC that has stopped responding working again. What do you have to do in this case?

Before you continue with the recovery , make sure that your PC has really stopped responding. Wait for a few minutes. Try to press the Caps Lock or Num Lock keys on the keyboard and see if their LED indicators change their state. If they work, it means that your PC is not frozen, but some application has caused it to hang. In this case, try to press Ctrl+Shift+Esc or Ctrl+Alt+Del and kill the hanged app with Task Manager.

Try to move your mouse. If the mouse pointer is not moving, but the keyboard still works, it can mean that you should replace your mouse.

If you are sure that your PC has hanged, here's how to recover: just press and hold the Power button for few seconds. That's it; your PC will be turned off. You can then press the Power button again to turn it on.

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Author: Sergey Tkachenko

Sergey Tkachenko is a software developer who started Winaero back in 2011. On this blog, Sergey is writing about everything connected to Microsoft, Windows and popular software. Follow him on Telegram, Twitter, and YouTube.

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