Because of my self-appointed title as an Ultimate Microsoft Fanman, it really pains me to disclose this One-Liner. That’s because saying it is a commonly used suggests that Internet Explorer locks up frequently.
Ouch! That hurt to type!
Truthfully, it could have been said of Firefox if I used it as much as I use IE. And to be fair, Internet Explorer might not lock up as much if I didn’t abuse it by keeping 25 windows open all the time, and continue to upgrade to the most recent beta version I can get my PowerShell-scripting hands on.
So when I get stuck, I dropped this One-Liner out there. It works great, even if the IE window is not responding to close requests through the taskbar, or through the close button on the application itself. This kills every Internet Explorer window
get-process iexplore | stop-process
You can exercise more surgical precision by going for only the top processor intensive process (or processes if you change “–First 1” to “-First 2”)
get-process iexplore | sort –descending cpu | select –First 1 | stop-process
Or by going for only the Internet Explorer windows with active threads
get-process iexplore | ? {$_.threads | ? {$_.threadstate –eq “Running”} } | stop-process
I really like this method the most. The thing that gives it an extra edge over the other methods is that if it kills open tabs but not all the tabs on a window, then the tab is reopened automatically. Hopefully it’s enough of a kick in the pants to get the window open.
Have I overlooked something? How can it be done better?
