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Kill A Windows Process When Task Manager Is Disabled

Sometime you may find windows difficult to bring up the Task Manager windows when one of the running program hangs. You want to kill the hung process so that your computer can work normally but you wait forever before the Task Manage comes up.

No matter you are running the taskmgr.exe from the Run dialog box; or right click the task bar and select Task Manager; or press Ctrl+Alt+Del on your keyboard; to wake up the Task Manager, sometime it just won't work and it is very annoying.

To overcome this problems, you can actually use the taskkill command at command prompt. Before you can kill a process, you also want to know which process to kill (normally identified by its image name or process id or window title). To list out a running processes, you can use the tasklist command at command prompt.

tasklist - This tool displays a list of currently running processes one either a local or remote machine.

Syntax -TASKLIST [/S system [/U username [/P [password]]]] [/M [module] | /SVC | /V] [/FI filter] [/FO format] [/NH]

To get details on the tasklist command, type tasklist /? at the command prompt.

For example, to list out the running processes:
tasklist /fi "status eq running"

To kill a process at command prompt, you need to execute taskkill followed by the process id or image name.

tasklist - This tool is used to terminate tasks by process id (PID) or image name.

To get details on the taskkill command, type taskkill /? at the command prompt.

For example, to kill a running process by image name:
taskkill /IM notepad.exe

For example, to kill a running process by process id:
taskkill /PID 1230

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