Close all open programs

I see End It All 2 frequently mentioned here at Lockergnome as the program to use when an application warns you to "close all open programs" or when one wants to use a defragment tool, etc. I always close all open windows, but I am seeing that other programs should likewise be closed; such as anti-virus, anti-spyware, firewall and basically anything else in the lower right-hand tray.

I have looked over the read me file in End It All 2 and the program's help file. I find it all very confusing and will have to read these things over a few times before I actually try to use this program.

Reading the internet, I find that a lot of people swear by this program. Conversely, a lot do not, but I think that they may have jumped in too quick. I will, as I said above, re-read the help files to try to avoid some of the horror stories I have read.

If you use this program, perhaps you wouldn't mind sharing what you close down and what you protect. Are there any configuration changes that need to be made from the out of box experience? Any helpful hints would be appreciated.

Thanks for reading.

Hello,

There is actually an interesting history behind all of this:

Back in the mid-1990s when Microsoft Windows 95 appeared, many of the developers of anti-virus software released new versions of their products, just like they would with any other operating system release. However, Microsoft and the various anti-virus developers did not cooperate as much as they now do, and many of these programs were written using a variety of methods that are, generally-speaking, considered poor programming practices, such as making use of undocumented APIs, modifying parts of the operating system running in memory and so forth. While these types of programming "hacks" did work, they tended to do so only when other programs that did similar things were not present. When two (or more) programs started changing the internal behavior of the operating system, it generally resulted in a lock-up or a crash due to the programs not being able to cope with the changes introduced by each other into the environment.

These days, Microsoft has published APIs and guidelines available for software developers who create these types of applications and, in turn, the various third-party developers who write security software are better about using them, so this is less of an issue today then it was a decade ago.

It certainly does not hurt to be cautious and disable security programs before performing some sort of low-level disk operation, however, chances are, your security program is not going to interfere with defragmenting or formatting a disk volume.

If you are concerned, what I would suggest doing is making a complete backup of the system, and then performing a defragmentation--or other operation--with all your security software in place. If a non-recoverable problem occurs you can recovery your system to its prior state by restoring the backup.

Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky