You often advise the use of the Windows Task Manager to force quit an application or process. In my Task Manager most of the processes are running under the name “HP_administrator”. When I go to close one of these processes a warning message appears saying that “Terminating the process can cause undesired results…”. Can I proceed to close these processes without causing permanent damage?

The message which appears when closing the task is just letting you know that if you close the process it may result in something strange happening (i.e. undesired results). This is because you are force closing the running process, rather than gracefully closing the process. Instead of allowing the process an opportunity to go through the normal motions of shutdown, you are literally yanking the process from execution (much like shutting down the computer properly versus pulling the power cord out of the wall while the computer is running). As such, there could be undesirable results and you also may potentially cause data corruption, should that process have been writing data at the time it was force closed. Granted, the chance of this occurring is relatively slim but it is a possibility.

All the processes running in the Task Manager are related to some program running on your computer. Before force closing the processes using Task Manager you should first try to close the program associated with the process, as closing the program may gracefully close the process. If you are unsure about what program each process relates to, search for the process name at www.processlibrary.com .

However, you may find that some processes can only be terminated by force closing the process. You should only do this if you have a burning desire to close the process, such as during a troubleshooting procedure, as this is quite a forceful routine. In your case, you should be able to close all the processes running under “HP_administrator”. Don’t worry about this user name – the reason it is called HP_administrator is likely because you have an HP computer which had the operating system pre-installed, so the default Windows username was configured as HP_administrator. On the topic of closing processes, make sure you do not close “explorer.exe” (the Windows graphical user interface) or “taskmgr.exe” (the Windows Task Manager) as you need both these processes.