Without more specifics, my general recommendation is to make sure all your software and drivers are up to date, and make sure your security software is working and up to date. The actual cause and solution depends on the specifics of what you’re seeing.ĭoes it happen all the time, or only when you do certain things? One specific application, or several? All of these things and more are clues necessary to ferret out the cause and come to a solution. It boils down to “it could be anything”, which is, unfortunately, fairly accurate. Make sure your security software is running and up to date. Whether intentional or simply because it’s poorly written, malware can cause other programs, or Windows itself, to become unresponsive. If hangs appear to be related to interacting with a specific device, it might make sense to make sure you have the latest drivers for that device - not to mention the latest updates for Windows as well. If that software has a bug, even if the hardware is working properly, the result could be a hung application. All the hardware on your system is in some way controlled by software. For example, a USB reader or thumb drive might experience a failure such that the next program to attempt to access it - even just to see if it exists - might end up “Not Responding”. Malfunctioning hardware can, in some cases, cause the software interacting with it to fail in ways making it unresponsive. If the message box is displayed off the screen or behind the application’s main window, it will appear as if the application is unresponsive. While that error message is displayed, the application’s main window stops responding until you dismiss the message. Sometimes a program displays an error message in a pop-up box. This is a variant of the preceding point, but I think of it as a different class of problem. As a user, there’s not much you can do except avoid whatever you did that brought the application to this point. If a calculation is mistakenly written so it never ends, and during which Windows is not given a chance to operate, the application may become “hung” and unresponsive. The classic case of an “infinite loop” in programming is perhaps the most common example. While lengthy calculations are one semi-legitimate cause, there are many other possibilities as well. Once the response arrives, it becomes responsive once again.Īnything causing an application to stop responding to your input, or to Windows’ internal requests, can cause “Not Responding” to appear in the title bar. During that time it might well become unresponsive. If the connection is bad or the remote server is slow, the program might spend a long time waiting for a response. Once the calculation is complete, the program starts listening and responding again.Ī different example is a program trying to access something over a network (like the internet). While it’s bad design to not respond while performing lengthy calculations, it’s also allowed and legitimate. It tried to pass your request to the application, but the app isn’t listening. If, during the operation or calculation, you attempt to close the window and nothing happens, Windows might eventually add “(Not Responding)” to the title bar. There are “legitimate” reasons this can happen.įor example, if the program you’re using is doing some very long, CPU-intensive calculation, it might not respond in a timely fashion - for example, a video editing program performing some operation on a large video, or a spreadsheet performing a lengthy calculation. If the program never comes out of that state, we also call it “hung”, as in “hung up” on something. When Windows asks a program to do something like take a keystroke or close itself, and the program fails to acknowledge the request within a certain amount of time, the program is classified as “Not Responding”. If you click on the Close Program “X” on a program’s window, and the program doesn’t acknowledge it, it’s “not responding”. If you type a key and the program you’re using doesn’t take it because it’s too busy doing something else, that’s “not responding”. Windows expects a running program to “interact” with it and respond to its requests in a timely fashion. Programs are expected to respond to Windows It can also be due to errors of various sorts including a programming bug, a design error, a hardware problem, malware, and more. This can be due to legitimate delays, as the program is busy working. “Not responding” happens when a program stops interacting with Windows properly.
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