It may have seemed like that, but killing explorer.exe doesn’t cause data loss. None of the running applications are spawned by explorer, you just use it to launch them as separate processes.
In my experience it’s a pretty common symptom of a drive that’s about to die or is connected improperly. (I had a PC where the vibration from a fan on the hard drive cage would cause a SATA cable to come loose over time.)
Explorer gets hung up trying to read data, becomes unresponsive, and crashes or causes a BSOD.
A lot of apps you launch do become child processes of explorer.exe. If explorer crashes they might misbehave or become zombie process in Unix terms. It depends on the app though. e.g. Firefox and Edge don’t but Chrome does.
That’s why I run explorer in multi-process mode. Folder windows cannot crash the shell process.
I run chrome, firefox and more under win11 at an MSP.
That whole comment is so much not true.
Firefox and Edge don’t but Chrome does.
Assuming you have the most up to date version of Edge: It’s literally Chromium. Don’t kid yourself.
And I crashed more than once my explorer.exe and my whole DE. Not once have I lost files.
If you have done a file move, maybe it would have but not just by crashing while clicking icons.
It may have seemed like that, but killing explorer.exe doesn’t cause data loss. None of the running applications are spawned by explorer, you just use it to launch them as separate processes.
maybe explorer crashing was a syntom of a lot of the system crashing, and that generalncrash that caused data loss?
In my experience it’s a pretty common symptom of a drive that’s about to die or is connected improperly. (I had a PC where the vibration from a fan on the hard drive cage would cause a SATA cable to come loose over time.)
Explorer gets hung up trying to read data, becomes unresponsive, and crashes or causes a BSOD.
A lot of apps you launch do become child processes of explorer.exe. If explorer crashes they might misbehave or become zombie process in Unix terms. It depends on the app though. e.g. Firefox and Edge don’t but Chrome does.
That’s why I run explorer in multi-process mode. Folder windows cannot crash the shell process.
I run chrome, firefox and more under win11 at an MSP.
That whole comment is so much not true.
Assuming you have the most up to date version of Edge: It’s literally Chromium. Don’t kid yourself.
And I crashed more than once my explorer.exe and my whole DE. Not once have I lost files.
If you have done a file move, maybe it would have but not just by crashing while clicking icons.
I’m glad you think that, but in my case it definitely did.
It literally doesn’t work that way. Wait, I got another one - BSOD is a problem with the hardware, not with Windows.