At times, when you try to sign out, shut down or reboot your PC, Windows 10 will warn you that some apps are still running and if you would like to save your work before proceeding to sign out, shut down, or reboot your Windows 10 computer.
If you don’t take any action for a minute, Windows 10 will terminate the sign out, shut down or restart operation and will bring you back to the desktop.
The confirmation or warning screen mostly shows up when automatically closing a program might incur data loss. For instance, if you have not saved changes made to a text file open in the Notepad program, Windows 10 will show you the confirmation screen.
While it’s a fantastic feature to have and helps avoid data loss, many of you might want to configure Windows 10 to automatically close programs and don’t show you the warning or confirmation screen. While there is no option in the Control Panel or Settings app to automatically close programs, you can do that via Registry.
In this guide, we will see how to make Windows 10 automatically close running programs or tasks before signing out, shutting down or restart.
Automatically close running programs in Windows 10
Step 1: Open the Registry Editor by typing Regedit in the Start/taskbar search field and then hitting the Enter key.
Click on the Yes button when you get the User Account Control prompt to open the Registry with admin rights. You will be asked to enter the admin account password if you have not signed in to the admin account.
Step 2: Navigate to the following key:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop
Step 3: On the right-side, right-click on an empty spot, click New, click String Value, and then name it as AutoEndTasks.
Step 4: Finally, double-click on AutoEndTasks and then set its value data to “1” to automatically force close running programs.
Close the Registry Editor and reboot your PC once to apply the changes.
From now onwards, Windows 10 will not show you the warning or confirmation screen to let you know that one or more programs are running before signing out, shutting down or rebooting your computer.
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