What happens if you end explorer.exe in different versions of Windows?

Timestamps:
00:00 - Title
00:05 - Windows 95, 98, ME
00:24 - Windows XP
01:57 - Windows Vista
04:08 - Windows 7
05:29 - Windows 8.1
11:28 - Windows 10

Text-to-speech version:

Music:
Kevin MacLeod - Voxel Revolution
Kevin MacLeod - Newer Wave
Kevin MacLeod - Ice Flow
Kevin MacLeod - Delightful D
Kevin MacLeod - Raving Energy

What Happens if You Have More than 26 Drives on Windows?

[World_of_OSes]

If you accidentally ended explorer.exe and don't know how to fix it, press Ctrl+Alt+Delete, then click 'Task Manager', then 'File', then 'Run new task', then type 'explorer', then click 'OK'.

[A-Random-Guy]

It's funny how ending / restarting explorer.exe fixes a lot of problems especially in windows 11 (currently)

[lulz_wav]

I actually do close explorer.exe when I'm running processes that require too many resources, it won't save much, but it helps.

[IrisGalaxis]

Up until a few years ago when I bought a decent computer, I had a 4GB RAM Win10 laptop which I always used with explorer off just to conserve as much RAM as possible and make it at least a bit faster. I used CMD for everything. I made a custom prompt in CMD which showed me the date and time. When I really needed an explorer window, I had a trick: start control.exe (Control Panel) and then just type in the path for whatever folder I needed in the address bar of that window. That'd bring up an explorer window without starting the taskbar and desktop, which would have taken ages to load.

[thepersonandtheguy]

never in my life would i have the balls to stop literally any windows background task with task manager

[angelcaru]

9:50 I guess you could say that... slipped through the cracks

[MUSiCK]

I always ended explorer.exe for that extra fps for my older laptop, always helped a tiny bit.

[NekoSam]

In Windows 11, with StartAllBack activated, something weird happenned
- The wallpaper will changes into your accent color that you used before (for me, brown)
- The minimized window is messed, maybe because it has rounded corners
- Animation, mica, etc still works
- Same as another systems, classic Alt + Tab dialog will apprears if you pressed that button

[thiemnguyen]

0:00 Title
0:05 Windows 95, 98, ME
0:24 Windows XP
1:57 Windows Vista(Aero)
4:08 Windows 7(Aero)
5:29 Windows 8.1(Aero)
11:28 Windows 10[21h2]
13:49 End screen

[ArtKater]

i personally think that ending explorer.exe is a decent way to refresh windows interfaces in case they froze

[bloro]

I tried it out, on NT 4.0, it the same as Vista; minimising programs makes them end up as small ribbons where the taskbar usually would be, and on 2000, it's the same as with XP, but the desktop background disappears and reverts to the colour you specified for it.

[mxaa]

I actually knew what would happen with windows 10 cuz i accidentally did it while ending background tasks to free up memory. Luckily it wasn't that hard to fix, just open cmd with a shortcut and start explorer from there.

[backhdlp]

I wonder what led Microsoft to think that making the process for the desktop shell and the process for the file explorer the same was a good idea.

[superNova]

i actually knew about the classic alt tab menu mainly because windows 10 broke so it was in certain places giving the 8.1 gray theme
Locking and unlocking the device gives you the light blue version

[GoodGuySemi]

I actually once closed it not knowing what it was, and had to find a way to manually start it again, which is probably easier to all of you than I make it out to be, but you all are also maybe 100 times more knowledgable of this stuff.

[mindfuzz]

i liked the attention to detail in this video! i clicked to find out what it would do in windows 9x, as all NT versions have a similar shell. didn't expect to actually learn anything about every major NT version LOL
i found it interesting how the desktop background stopped staying around once 8.1 (and by extension 8) hit. i guess the shell was either refactored or completely rewritten for the start screen. also didn't know there was a difference between metro apps and UWP apps - thought they were all just UWP. is windows 10 backwards compatible with metro apps (and is win8 somehow forwards compatible with UWP? assuming they're built on the same foundations)?

[FatheredPuma]

I use to do this back in the day with a game booster. 12MB of RAM was huge when you only had 512MB.

[Garwinium]

Windows 8 was truly one of the operating systems of all time

[SOTP.]

Never thought killing explorer could make a video like this. Pretty cool.

[MirkoMazzoni]

Explorer.exe fact: If you run explorer.exe (meaning starting a new process) while explorer.exe is running (ot sometimes because of a failure that I still can't explain) it opens the Documents (or whatever is opened) 📂 (at least in XP but idk if this applies to other OSes)