Task Management
Information
This tutorial will show you how to quickly and easily kill wayward programs and processes that have stopped working or not functioning as expected.
Note
The command line will be used throughout this tutorial.
Sometimes it is necessary to close programs and tasks by brute-force as they have stopped responding or not functioning as expected. In these cases the usual methods of closing a program wont work. Often the programs start sucking resources from the OS and thereby become unresponsive.
For these occasions this method is a handy quick way to get the program resolved.
1. Start the command prompt by typing cmd in the start menu search bar and press enter
2. With cmd running you can get a list of running applications and tasks by typing tasklist in the cmd window.
3. We are mostly interested in the PID (Process ID number) column. Every running program or task has a unique PID associated with it. This allows for easy task management For instance there may be a couple of instances of the same program running with the same name but using different PIDs thereby making it harder to kill the process using its name.
4. So with the list of tasks we can now begin to take action. In this example lets imagine that Messenger has become unresponsive and we need to kill it.
To kill the process you use the command taskkill. So to kill messenger in this case you use:
taskkill /PID 3836
As you will see, you will get notification of success or failure to kill the task. The offending program or task also disappears from the desktop.
Note
You could also type taskkill /IM msnmsgr.exe which would have the same affect. But of course if you have two processes with the same name, the PID method would be preferred.
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