Journal Chacham's Journal: Chronicle: Killed smss.exe 4

I almost never reboot Windows at the office. It takes too long, requires turning off all the stuff the IT department uses to ruin my day, and wastes time getting things setup just right. Instead, i just hibernate, and bear the few minutes it takes to get back to normal. (Hmm.. very winteresting.)

This morning while "researching" why some system process (via Process Explorer) was hogging 200MB of memory, and tried restarting it. Luckily, it rejected the idea, and told me other processes relied on it. So, i clicked back to tree list, leaving it highlighted, and saw its progeny included smss.exe. Perhaps out of sheer ignorance, perhaps because i got it mixed up with sms.exe, i asked to restart it. Instant BSOD.

Come to think of it, that was really stupid. Firstly, killing the session manager would at best shut down the OS. But i should have researched it first. So silly. Please, laugh at me, heartily.