How do you get out of a frozen game?

[hagbard]

This has been bugging me for years. My son plays a game, and it freezes. You Ctrl-Alt-Del and nothing happens. Mouse still moves but does nothing, same with keyboard. So, how to I kill the game to get back to windows?

[dasaylay]

Alt+F4

[hagbard]

Alt+F4

Thanks. My son said he tried that and it didn't work.

[masterballer]

Restart i guess...if it wont respond to any inputs then a restart is the only thing i can think of.

[hagbard]

When they first brought out XP, it was claimed that no one application would bring it down...that was its selling point.

[Ojam]

Windows key?

[mxhp00]

alt + tab?

[movieman]

Some games deliberately block all these keys: 'Stalker' being a glaring example... it's dumb when a game that doesn't regularly lock up deliberately disables standard Windows features, it's truly appalling when a game that does regularly lock up does so.

I stopped playing that one altogether because I got fed up of having to hit the reset button; I'm sure there was some dialog box there saying 'oh dear, I crashed again, click OK to exit' but I couldn't get to it because the game blocked the keys that would have returned me to the desktop. I know the PC hadn't crashed because I could see the disks over the network.

[ShadowVlican]

if 30 seconds of button smashing doesn't work, i hit the hard reset button

[silentio]

Perhaps plugging something into the USB port that displays a message telling you it's finding a driver can bring it back to the desktop

[hagbard]

Windows Key, Alt-tab, tried all those. Guess its a cold boot.

[jeffyjaixx]

When I encounter that, I usually do alt+tab, windows logo button or Alt F4.

[skewed]

Maybe your hardware is hanging and not the operating system.

If your system always hangs and becomes unresponsive while playing games, it could be your video card id overheating, software driver bug or something. Some 3d games really push video cards to the limits and make them run to their full potential creating alot of heat. If your video card isn't capable of removing the heat from the source, it will shut itself down way before it damages itself.