How to Kill Stubborn Processes That Fail to End Process in Task Manager

A program hanging can cause your computer to become very slow or even unresponsive. When encountering such situation, what you normally do is to go to task manager, look for the culprit program that eats up huge CPU utilization and kill it. However, sometimes you may not able to do so. No matter how many times you have tried to kill the process, the process still continues to run and doesn’t leave any CPU cycle for other tasks processing, ended up that you need to hard reboot your computer. This could be very irritating and inefficient, even worst is you may lost the data that cannot be recovered completely. Now here is a utility that can kill and terminate the stubborn processes without having you to reboot your computer system.

The utility is known as PsKill from Microsoft Sysinternals. PsKill is an executable file that doesn’t required any installation. It is not only able to kill processes locally, but also able to kills processes on remote computers. To use PsKill to kill hang process, follow below instructions:

1. Download PsKill utility.

2. Unzip the package and copy pskill.exe to C:\WINDOWS\system32.

3. Right click on taskbar then select Task Manager. Go to Processes tab and look for the hang process PID. If PID column doesn’t not exist, go to View -> Select Columns, tick PID (Process Identifier). Write down the PID value.

4. Open command prompt by going to Start -> Run, then type cmd and press enter.

5. Type pskill, space and followed by the PID value. For example, if the PID is 9596, then type pskill 9596 and press enter. The process will be terminated without affecting other running processes.


This entry was posted on Friday, February 6th, 2009 at 12:19 am and is filed under Utilities. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

11 Responses to “How to Kill Stubborn Processes That Fail to End Process in Task Manager”

  1. Pskill Terminates Extremely Stubborn Applications | Lifehacker Australia
    October 15th, 2009 05:54
    11

    [...] [via My Digital Life] Tagged:task [...]

  2. Chris
    September 13th, 2009 07:36
    10

    Fail? Adobe Flash Media Live Encoder will not close for me…. the window closed but the process remains unallowing me to reopen the window and record from my A/V card because the first process seems to still be using the card.

  3. vuser1
    August 10th, 2009 06:09
    9

    In Vista pskill can kill only same processes which Task Manager or Process Explorer. None can kill some hang processes, system even can’t reboot! One has to use good old reset button or power plug…

  4. Jeff
    July 2nd, 2009 05:35
    8

    Didn’t work for me, either. Bah. Hard reboot.

  5. Hi
    June 8th, 2009 14:01
    7

    Fail. Doesn’t work.

  6. Niveditha
    June 8th, 2009 05:29
    6

    u said it wudnt affect other process, but my system is shutting down immediately..

  7. infiniter
    May 5th, 2009 16:49
    5

    In my case, whether PsKill nor Process Explorer where able to kill a task that was not protected. It was a simply hanging process with some threads. Nothing special.

  8. Denise R
    April 29th, 2009 14:41
    4

    Pskill and process explorer are great tools, but if a process really hangs, neither of them will manage to kill it. I have a terminal server where cmd.exe hangs for one users. I can’t reboot because of all the other users, and the poor user who owns the cmd.exe process is unable to log out. Is there another way to really force the process dead? I can’t even force logoff, it fails.

  9. crap
    April 27th, 2009 21:09
    3

    dude.. this app doesn’t work!
    The official way to end unresponsive tasks in Vista is to pull the power plug.. everyone agrees to that..

  10. rick`
    April 14th, 2009 20:28
    2

    Just downloaded this to kill a number of programs which task manager isn’t ending. At first I though it was just another app taking my cpu cycles but 2hrs+ later, that app is done and the process is still running… even after using this :(

  11. Hannibal001
    February 13th, 2009 05:31
    1

    Process explorer from sysinternals can do basically the same thing and can be used to replace task manager,although I have not had to ever try to kill a process w/ it on a network system it does an efficient job on main system.
    It also has a handle finder for unshown processes which seems to work fine.
    This may be a simpler solution for some less proficient users.

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