Recover accidentally closed programs in Windows

Posted on May 15, 2008 at 5:33 am

Have you ever ended up closing a program that you didn’t mean to close? For example, maybe you have several browser windows open, your email open, instant messengers connected, and a photo editing program like Photoshop open. You go to close Photoshop, but you accidentally click the wrong “X”, thereby closing the browser and all of the tabs that were open too.

Now you would have to re-open your browser window and load up all of the pages you had open previously, if you can even remember what was there! Pain in the butt! Wouldn’t it be nice if you could recover any accidentally closed program for up to 60 seconds? Yes, you could re-open it manually like normal, but why not save yourself time and energy, right?

GoneIn60s is a nitfy little freeware app that takes care of this small, yet annoying problem. What does it do? Basically, whenever you click the X button on any program, GoneIn60s tells Windows to not kill it for 60 more seconds, thereby giving you a chance to instantly load it back up with no loss of data or settings.

Once you have it download, just run the EXE and you’ll see a small icon in the system tray, which you can right-click to see the list of programs that you can recover (will only show stuff that was closed in the last 60 seconds).

As you can see, I had closed a Firefox window while on the Google AdWords tab. I had several other tabs open and was able to simply click once to get my window back! Sweet! The program basically acts like a middle man for you. Close the program, it’ll capture your request before the operating system does, wait 60 seconds, and then send the close request to the OS.

There are also some settings for the program that you can change, including the shutdown delay, which is by default 60 seconds. Just right-click and choose Settings to customize.

You can also add programs in that you want it to ignore, which means it will not delay the shutdown of the program. Go to the Task Manager to see the name of the process for the program if you want to add it to the ignore list.

There is also an option “Kill Windows”, which basically means that after the 60 seconds time expires, the program will not ask you to save any changes you may have made. I would recommend keeping it unchecked!

I would definitely use this program if you are someone who has lots of stuff open all the time and especially if you use programs that don’t prompt you when you close them, like browsers, email, etc.

Note I just thought of another great way to use this program! If you’re at the office browsing the Internet or watching a video in Windows Media Player, you could close it out quickly so that the program would be hidden and after everything is safe, you can bring it right back up from where it left off! So it’s useful for hiding programs or windows quickly without having to close them! Enjoy! Source: Tech Xpress

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13 Responses to “Recover accidentally closed programs in Windows”

Nirmal said on : May 15th, 2008 at 7:25 am

This is pretty popular little freeware. I have used it before.

Madhur Kapoor said on : May 15th, 2008 at 9:11 am

This will be very useful for me. I always end up closing a lot of windows in a single click .

akishore said on : May 15th, 2008 at 9:48 am

Nirmal, I never knew about it till recently! I really like it though, especially when I have a bunch of Firefox windows open.

Madhur, me too! It doesn’t eat up that much memory either, so I’m happy about that.

Keith Dsouza said on : May 15th, 2008 at 5:07 pm

This is a real good find, I sometimes have overlapped windows and click on the wrong x icon by mistake and close some thing completely different than what I intended to, this will definitely help me :).

Pavan Kumar said on : May 15th, 2008 at 7:31 pm

That’s cool software… but it might be a problem when we end some bulky processes intentionally, and this asks windows not to kill for 60 seconds.. we need to kill them manually then… anyway’s a nice find..

Ram Sathish said on : May 15th, 2008 at 11:31 pm

cool s/w dude !! I keep messing with the programs now and then… now i’ve to plan !!
thanks bro !!

akishore said on : May 16th, 2008 at 12:57 am

Keith, I do that all the time too! I have way too many windows open and I end up closing the wrong windows.

Pavan, well it will kill it normally after 60 seconds, so unless you need that memory back instantly, then it should be ok.

Ram, no problem! I’m always installing freeware apps on my computer! too many!

TechnoLaziness said on : May 17th, 2008 at 4:02 am

Interesting but it does n’t seem to capture close request at my xp. Anybody having this issue.

Syahid A. said on : May 17th, 2008 at 7:02 am

Fantastic find Aseem! Never knew that this one is around until today.

akishore said on : May 17th, 2008 at 8:41 am

TechnoLaziness - What do you mean by does not capture close request? It captures it, holds the request for 60 seconds by default, and then sends the request to the OS.

Syahid - Yeah it’s pretty nifty! I use this and I also delay my Outlook emails from sending in a similar fashion, both very useful.

TechnoLaziness said on : May 18th, 2008 at 12:42 pm

Yeah it does capture now. It didn’t take up in first run though restarting app. sorted the issue.