Mastering a few key Windows commands can save you time, troubleshoot issues, and unlock hidden features. From speeding up tasks to fixing common problems, the Command Prompt and PowerShell are powerful tools to solve some of these issues.

In this post, I will explore interesting and useful Windows commands and update this post regularly.


Table Of Contents
  1. Force a Restart of the Explorer.exe
  2. Links


Force a Restart of the Explorer.exe

The explorer.exe (Windows Explorer) is a critical system process in Windows that provides the graphical user interface (GUI), including:

  • The desktop (icons, wallpaper, and right-click menu)
  • The taskbar (Start menu, system tray, and open apps)
  • File Explorer (folders, drives, and file management)


In case the we can’t restart the explorer.exe directly on the machine by using for example the task manager, we can terminate and restart it by using the CMD or PowerShell shown below.


The following command forcefully closes Windows Explorer and then restarts it. This can be useful for refreshing the its controled components mentioned above if they frozen or misbehaving.

> taskkill /f /im explorer.exe && start explorer.exe


We can also fire up this command from remote by using for example the psexec utility from Sysinternals and shown in my following post.

Sysinternals and its PsExec Tool

Links

Windows Start button or the taskbar is not working – ideapad, ideacentre
https://support.lenovo.com/mn/en/solutions/ht503047-taskbarstart-button-does-not-respond-windows-10-ideapad-ideacentre