RestartSGE is an easy interface to quickly restart the Windows Audio Service, Graphics Driver and Windows Explorer.
I recently installed an old, unreliable audio interface onto one of my test PC's. I realized that every so often, it would lock up and stop playing audio. This would usually become apparent when trying to play a YouTube video and just getting a wait-spinner that never ended. Turns out, the HTML5 player in YouTube was waiting for a response from the Windows audio service, a response which would never come. Fortunately restarting the service immediately fixed the problem.
Likewise, occasionally you'll run into issues while using your GPU that require the video drivers to be restarted. Usually this happens during or after strenuous GPU use, like a session of video encoding, cryptocurrency mining or gaming.
Finally, Windows Explorer can sometimes tie itself up. This can be due to other problems like a failing hard drive, bad memory, misbehaving shell extensions or a litany of other issues.
In any case, I thought it would be nice to have an easily accessible control panel to quickly restart these items in one place. Nothing seemed to exist like this, so I made one.
This free download is a portable Windows executable that you can save and run from anywhere on your PC. It will require Administrative privileges in order to restart system services. This application requires Windows 10 or 11.
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