Windows

Feb 6, 2009

SY Wong

65 Comments

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

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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.

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3. TrustedInstaller.exe Process 100% High CPU Usage in Vista Task Manager Fix
4. Kill, Terminate or Stop a Windows Unresponsive, Hanged or Frozen Application or Process
5. Download Extended Task Manager to Replace Windows Task Manager with More Powerful Features

65 Comments

• 
  java December 5, 2011 at 8:29 pm

  Doesn’t work at all! Process is still there, even though pskill says it killed the process how lame is that?

  Reply
• 
  Winfoe July 27, 2011 at 6:47 pm

  Use

  Taskkill /IM firefox.exe /F

  instead

  Reply
• 
  Winfoe July 27, 2011 at 6:46 pm

  useless– does not work on windows 7 — this was designed for xp windows server 2003

  Reply
• 
  Michael July 23, 2011 at 11:24 am

  Phoenix.exe (Second Life client) will not end and cannot be killed by PsKill

  Reply
  • 
    Alexel August 2, 2011 at 8:42 am

    I am having this exact same problem with phoenix viewer. I have looked around the internet for many solutions, but to this day I haven't been able to find one. If you find some way to do this, please let me know. I will also let you know if I find a solution myself. This can be very irritating having to restart each time.

    Reply
• 
  Shaun July 16, 2011 at 7:38 pm

  It doesn't work…

  I can't kill anything that the task manager won't kill. I still have hanging processes that PSKILL doesn't stop and also some it will even deny access to

  Reply
• 
  Buzz May 19, 2011 at 12:22 am

  Trying to kill PID for TrueCrypt On Windows 7 Ultimate 32 Bit.

  Guess what? Shock Horror just like every other app out there it's useless.

  Reply
• 
  Sunil May 4, 2011 at 7:40 am

  Worked like a charm.. however several of the same processes are active, kill them in the order from the first listed in the processes and then go down.. apparently it would not work in any other order..

  Reply
• 
  billy March 21, 2011 at 1:06 pm

  i am using windows xp sp2, this program kills the procces, but it keeps coming back with a different PID code

  Reply
• 
  kinshuk March 18, 2011 at 10:45 am

  Thanks mate. This one was bugging me for quite some time. Its cleared now. Thanks again.

  Reply
• 
  chazza February 23, 2011 at 8:06 am

  For some reason I have an instance of skype running (just in process view, no window) and pskill will not kill it. Also cannot write pdh.dll into system32. Says process 5692 killed. Not removed from process view.

  Reply
• 
  blabla February 13, 2011 at 11:43 pm

  win7 x64 ult

  xmbc.exe isnt killable

  pskill doesnt work

  Reply
• 
  Carl February 10, 2011 at 7:57 am

  sorry one more minor update. I'm currently running Windows XP-Pro SP-3 on the admin account.

  Reply
  • 
    Anthony September 24, 2011 at 6:36 am

    Well if you right-click cmd and select run as admin it will kill whatever ya want. did anyone try it?

    Reply
    • 
      Pierre November 10, 2011 at 8:36 am

      I’ve tried it many times. Sorry, that is just not true. I’ve seen processes so stubborn that you can’t kill them with administrator privileges.

      Reply

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