So, say I want to kill Slack, but I don’t know which PID to chose in the list: You are not restricted to using the PID only, and you can use the Image name too. If there is a program, you want to kill, scroll through the list, then look for the PID. As you can see in the screenshot, a table lists all running programs by Image Name, PID, Session Name, Session#, and Memory Usage. To stop this from happening, launch the command prompt with administrator privileges.Īt the command prompt, type: tasklist, which will generate a list of running programs just like those you would find in the Windows Task Manager, only way cooler looking with more power. This is thanks partly to its ability to home in on a program’s PID or process ID. The Task Kill command can resolve such issues with a little more power and grace by getting to the root of the problem. For example, this can happen with a Windows installer package (msiexec.exe) when you boot Windows 10. Since there’s no user interface to it, you’d never know it was stuck in the background, eating up resources. Sometimes a program will run silently in the background for completely routine reasons but fail or get hung up somewhere along the line. Whether it’s a glitch or conflict in the system or something more malicious, a program can sometimes end up making the desktop unstable, oftentimes requiring a reboot. Some programs and background services in Windows 10 can prove hard to kill when you want to exit them.

Stop Programs from the Command Prompt Using Taskkill

Oh, and we’ll be running this from the command line, so get your fingers ready. The advanced task kill command gives you more control as you end processes and even works on tasks that refuse to close even after killing them in Task Manager. What you might not know is that there is a hidden, even more powerful way to close pesky processes in Windows 10: the taskkill command.

Task manager background processes