Task Manager is one good place to kill program which hangs though you can make them auto kill but sometimes its not preferable and sometime even the task manager hangs. Here is a nifty trick which makes you to kill program from command line or windows dos.

Windows has two programs called as Taskkill and Tasklist. While one allows you to kill programs another lists all the programs running  Now you need both of them as taskkill needs a PID or Process ID of that program which can be found through tasklist. So lets give it a run ( Go to command prompt by typing cmd or command and then change to system32 folder windows or WINNT

Task List ( tasklist.exe )

Task Kill ( taskkill.exe)

Here are the options for Task Kill

C:\WINDOWS\system32>taskkill /?

TASKKILL [/S system [/U username [/P [password]]]]
{ [/FI filter] [/PID processid | /IM imagename] } [/F] [/T]

Description:
This command line tool can be used to end one or more processes.
Processes can be killed by the process id or image name.

Parameter List:
/F Specifies to forcefully terminate
process(es).

/PID process id Specifies the PID of the process that
has to be terminated.

/IM image name Specifies the image name of the process
that has to be terminated. Wildcard ‘*’
can be used to specify all image names.

/T Tree kill: terminates the specified process
and any child processes which were started by it.

There are more but you will need 2 of these max. Get the PID from Task List and then kill it forcefully using /F option or /T for child process. This is pretty neat way of killing programs and just needs 10 minutes of learning. Give it a try

Tags: command line tool, dos windows, process id, task list, taskkill, tasklist