Sometimes when my six year old niece visits me, she plays computer games, draws flowers and cartoons on Paint and so on. But she never closes any window when she is done. As a result, she leaves two dozen open windows which I have to close one by one and let me tell you that it is an utterly tormenting experience each time. But now I have found an application called Close All Windows that lets me close all the open windows with a single click. Close All Windows sends a WM_CLOSE message to all the running applications and if everything goes okay, all the applications obediently close down.
Close all Windows is a Windows application and lets you close all running applications quickly with just a single click. It does not use system resources because it only flashes a “Close” signal to all open applications on the desktop and then shuts down itself. The application itself is portable and does not require installation. You can download it from the NtWind Software website. Then extract it in a folder and run it from there to close all the open applications.
You should create a shortcut of Close All Windows on your desktop for easy access. Then all you have to do is double-click on this shortcut and all the open applications would close down. If you are editing a document in a program (say in Microsoft Windows), then you may get a prompt to save the document before closing. You can also pin this shortcut to your Windows taskbar, if you think that you are going to use it very often.
Pinning the Close All Windows application to Windows taskbar is very easy. First of all you have to download and extract the Close All Windows to a folder on your hard disk. Then right-click on CloseAll.exe and choose Pin to Taskbar from the context-menu as shown in the following picture.
This would pin the Close All Windows application to your Windows taskbar. It would be shown to the right of all previously pinned applications. But you can drag it around and change its position on the taskbar. In the following picture, I dragged it to the leftmost position near the Start Menu. Now if you click on this pinned shortcut, all the opened windows will be closed.
What if you do not want to close some select windows. For example, most people would not want to close Windows Explorer as it would close all the folders. Close All Windows has a workaround for this. You can specifiy which applications are not to be closed in the command line. For example, if you do not want to close Firefox and Windows Explorer, then change the shortcut command to : CloseAll.exe -x=”firefox.exe|explorer.exe”. You can add more applications executables by separating them each by a pipe character (‘|’). You can find more information about this in the program’s ReadMe.txt file.
So if you often have to grapple with the task of closing a large number of windows, then Close All Windows is just the application for you. It is completely free, portable application and supports all the versions of Windows. You can download Close All Windows from http://www.ntwind.com/software/utilities/close-all.html.