Windows has been with us for more than 30 years. Since the first version that was launched on the market, there have been many new versions of Windows that have reached the market to date, with Windows 11 being the latest version of Windows available and with official support. With each new version of Windows, Microsoft has been implementing new features, most of them focused on improving our productivity.
With the release of each new version of Windows, Microsoft documents all the features that are included, however this is not always the case. A clear example is found in a function that allows you to turn off the equipment, an emergency shutdown that currently does not make much sense, but years ago, when canceling any action that we had executed on the equipment was impossible, since the operation of multitasking was not the same as today, due, in part, to the processors of the time.
The first time this emergency shutdown was implemented was in 1995 with the launch of Windows NT 3.51, a version focused on the business world and which, for now, is still available in all versions of Windows that have been released, including Windows 10 and Windows 11. When using this function, the computer will automatically shut down without saving the changes to the documents that we have open if we have not previously saved them.
How to activate Windows emergency shutdown
The emergency shutdown feature is not available through the classic Windows Start button. The only way to access it is with the traditional Ctrl + Alt + Del, a key combination that in MS-DOS and Windows 3.11 allowed you to restart the computer directly, without any questions or warnings and that, currently, we can use to restart our PC when the blue screen of death appears or when we start the computer under an operating system without a graphical interface.
Once we press the Ctrl + Alt + Delete key combination, a blue screen will be displayed, both in Windows 10 and Windows 11 with the options: Block, Switch user, Log out and Task Manager. Next, click on the icon located in the lower right corner and, holding down the Ctrl buttonpressed on To turn off.
At that time, the team will close each and every one of the applications that we have open, without asking, so if we have not saved the changes, we will lose them irretrievably.
This hidden function of Windows can be extremely useful when our computer has been infected by a virus and it does not allow us to work normally. It can also be useful when it starts doing strange things for no apparent reason and, instead of looking for the source of the problem, we panic, hence its name. We can also use it to quickly turn off our equipment, since, in the end, it is the user who has to find a utility for this hidden function.
