It's the first annual "Tip From the 55th"...

If you've played 2142 for more than a few days, you'll be able to relate to this...

You're home from work/school, the children/wife/parents are sleeping/out, you sit down to enjoy a few rounds of 2142 TG style.

Things are going great--you cap Command Center on Shingle, snag Ruins on Gibraltar, etc...a few minutes later, you're defending South Town on Cerbere when all of a sudden...WHAM...the server has a spasm, an identity crisis, a single bit in the wrong place...the game freezes.

Frantically, you run through the "Get control of the computer" key strokes--CTRL-ALT-DEL, CTRL-SHIFT-ESC, CTRL-ESC...even go so far as to hammer the Windows™ key multiple times...nothing. You're just left looking at the last frame of action, frozen in time, perhaps with nothing more than a repeating sound loop playing in your ear as the only indication that time hasn't stopped completely.

What do you do in this situation? Some of you may notice that it looks like the OS is "listening" to you--maybe you see something flash on the screen as if the Task Manager really did open up. Unfortunately, you can't see what you're doing since the game has taken over your screen.

Fret not, dear friend, there's no need to reach for that power switch, no need to unceremoniously kick Windows™ to the curb. Heck, it's bad enough as it is, let's not make it any worse, right?

What you need is a little forethought and a little help from taskkill.exe, which should be part of every XP (Pro at least) install.

Create a new Windows™ shortcut and use this as the "location":

Code:

taskkill /F /IM BF2142* /T

Then name it something memorable like "Kill BF2142 Cuz The Server Crashed Again". (Feel free to further expand upon that file name should you require more detail.)

Now, get properties of the new shortcut (right-click, choose Properties) and set a Shortcut Key. Something like "CTRL-ALT-K" for Kill...anything you won't accidentally press during game play.

You're all set. Now, the next time the game freezes when you're just about to celebrate a hard won victory, you should be able to press CTRL-ALT-DEL to get Windows'™ attention, then press your shortcut key, like CTRL-ALT-K.

In a few seconds (depends on how hosed up the game is) you should see the game disappear as a command prompt window appears briefly and then vanishes--leaving you at your desktop.

If there's a few games you routinely play, instead of creating a different shortcut for each one, each with its own shortcut key press, create a batch or command file and put a taskkill line in it for each game.

Code:

rem Contents of KillGames.cmd
taskkill /F /IM BF2142* /T
taskkill /F /IM BF2* /T
taskkill /F /IM DeusEx* /T

Then, just create a shortcut to this command file and assign a shortcut key. Now, when you press your shortcut key, Windows will attempt to kill any of the processes you've entered in the file.

You can read all about the taskkill command by running "taskkill /?" at the command prompt, but to summarize the above commands, we're asking Windows to forcibly kill any process whose executable name begins with "BF2142" (for example) and to kill the whole process tree, the main program and any other child processes it may have launched.

Stay tuned until next year, when the 55th brings you Tip #2...betcha can't wait, huh?