Some know it as the 3-finger salute: A simultaneous press of the CONTROL, ALTERNATE, and DELETE keys.
For some versions of Windows, if you had a password on your PC, you had to press this key sequence in order to log on. And in most versions of Windows this is what you press to bring up Task Manager and some other basic computer options.
While pressing CTRL-ALT-DEL is a good way to try to thaw a frozen PC, I discovered it might be a bad thing to press during boot up. That is, before Windows displays the logon screen.
I have never hesitated from pressing CTRL-ALT-DEL before. After all, it was a requirement for logging onto Windows NT. And a safe way to go about killing an unwanted process (a malicious pop-up, or a hung program). But I won’t do it again during boot up.
I was wanting to check a setting in my computer BIOS – but I failed to press the right key in time to do that. So I quick hit CTRL-ALT-DEL, thinking it would safely reboot my PC right away so I could try again to enter the BIOS. Oops!! Windows would not boot normally after that.
Fortunately, Windows 7 was able to "repair" itself, although it took several minutes to do so. First, it ran the disk for a long time. Then it wanted to do a System Restore. Then it ran the disk for quite awhile longer. But eventually, it booted up. I breathed a sigh of relief, and decided against ever interupting the Windows bootup process again.
1 comment:
Yikes. I wonder if you were late enough that Windows had already started its bootup process when you interrupted it?
Incidentally, as annoying as it is, Ctrl-Alt-Del is considered a security feature. Supposedly only Windows itself is "allowed" to respond to that keystroke combination. In other words, if hitting Ctrl-Alt-Del brings up a login box, it's pretty likely that the box is actually from Windows and not some other program mimicking Windows.
Then again, nothing says Windows itself hasn't been secretly modified to change this behavior...
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