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Close All: Shut Down All Running Windows Applications With A Hotkey

When using the computer for a long time, it is quite common to have a lot of windows open at the same time on your desktop. In case you want to shutdown your PC, closing each window down one by one is not time efficient, and if you are in a hurry, you may want to close down everything as soon as possible. Windows allows you to quickly close down a particular type of window by holding down shifting and clicking the close button. For instance, if you want to close multiple Windows Explorer windows, instead of clicking the close button one by one, you can just hold down Shift key and click close to instantly close down all the Windows Explorer windows. However, you cannot close down different types of open windows using the default available options. Wouldn’t it have been nicer to have a quick way to close all the windows within a single click? It looks like our wish is granted with Close All. It is a portable application for Windows that allows you to close all running programs with just a single click. More on Close All after the jump.

Close All doesn’t use a lot of system resources and there hardly is anything to talk about its interface. It only flashes a “close” signal to all the open application on the desktop, and then ceases. To instantly close all the open applications, just run the application by clicking its executable file inside the source folder.

CloseAll_2012-03-28_12-48-27

In order to avoid having to open the source folder every time you want to use it, you can create a shortcut of the tool in the Start Menu, Quick Launch bar or on your desktop. This would provide a detour to instantly close multiple windows.

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For even faster access, you may also add a hotkey to the application. To add a hotkey, first make a shortcut of Close All on your desktop. Then, open the shortcut’s properties and set a hotkey for the shortcut.

CloseAll.exe - Shortcut Properties

The application works on both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8. Testing was carried out on Windows 7 Ultimate edition.

Download Close All

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