How to programmatically terminate a process. How to “kill” a program in Windows that the task manager cannot close

Sooner or later, many users have a question about how to close a program if it does not close. In fact, the topic is not so simple. After all, frozen applications are a huge problem for users. They not only load the operating system and processor, but also interfere with normal operation of the computer. The following will provide the best tips and recommendations for what to do if you cannot close an application.

How to determine if a program is frozen

Before racking their brains for an answer to the question of how to close a program if it won't close, the user must understand whether the application is truly frozen. It is likely that the computer's performance leaves much to be desired, and the "close" command simply takes a long time to process.

Typically, if an application is frozen, it will stop responding to user input, the cursor will turn into either an hourglass or a small circle (depending on the operating system), and the application title will read “Not responding.” At the same time, all attempts to complete work with the program in the usual way (by clicking on the cross in the upper right corner of the screen) do not produce results. Also, when you click on the working area of ​​the program, the screen becomes “covered in fog.” All these are signs of freezing. How can I close a program if it won't close? The best tips and tricks will be presented below.

Expectation

The first advice is to wait a little. Don't forget that a computer has a certain power. When the processor is loaded and RAM OS speed decreases. And it takes longer to process the transaction.

Accordingly, you will have to wait a little. When the computer takes a long time to respond to actions performed in the program, all signs of freezing are observed. The waiting period should not exceed 5-10 minutes. If after this time there are no responses to user actions, you can proceed to other shutdown methods.

Method 1: Hotkeys

So, it turned out that the program is not responding. How to close a frozen program? If waiting does not produce results, the user must choose one course of action or another. You can press some keys on the keyboard, as well as their combinations.

When the program freezes, you are prompted to click on:

• Ctrl+W
• Alt + F4.

These combinations contribute to the emergency closure of many frozen programs. Not the most effective, but a valid method. But this is just the beginning. There are several more options.

Method 2: through the menu

How can I close a program if it won't close? The following trick works more often than a keyboard shortcut. Users use it in practice with noticeable success. To close a frozen application, you can call up the program action menu, and then select the appropriate function there.

To do this you need:

1. Place the cursor over the program window on the taskbar.
2. Right-click on the appropriate application.
3. In the menu that appears, select "Close window". If the system issues a warning, agree with it.
4. Wait a while.

As a rule, after the actions taken, the program closes on its own after 10-15 seconds. If this method didn't help, no need to panic. You can try using other methods. Luckily, Windows provides quite a few ways to close applications.

Method 3: Task Manager

Which ones exactly? How can you close a program if it freezes? When the listed methods do not produce results, the user is asked to act somewhat differently. For example, call the task manager, and then end the process launched by a particular program.

This method is the most effective. It allows you to urgently close almost any program. Doesn't work only in some cases. Therefore, users often prefer it.

How to close a program that is frozen or unresponsive? This requires:

1. Press the key combination Ctrl + Alt + Del. Or Ctrl + Shift + Esc will do.
2. Select "Task Manager" in the window that appears. If you used a combination with "Shift", this step you can skip it. The corresponding service will open immediately.
3. Go to the "Applications" tab.
4. Select the frozen program and click on the “End task” or “End task” button.
5. Accept the operating system warning (if it is issued), and then wait a bit.

As a rule, after 5-15 seconds the program will be closed urgently. In some cases, it is suggested to send a message about the error of the corresponding application. This method can be improved a little. To do this, go to the "Processes" tab in the "Task Manager", then select the name of the process that is being executed by the frozen program, and click on "End". This will close the application approximately 99% of the time.

Method 4: additional programs

In some situations, additional software helps. Some processes are terminated forcibly only with their help. Not the most common, but an effective solution to the problem. How to close a program that has frozen? The user must download and install a special additional application to search for processes running on your computer, and then repeat the same steps as in the Task Manager. Process Explorer is perfect for this idea.

How can I close a program if it won't close? The user will have to:

1. Download Process Explorer for yourself.
2. Launch the program. The application does not require installation, which makes users very happy.
3. Find the desired program/process in the list on the left side of the screen.
4. Select it by right-clicking on the corresponding line.
5. In the menu that appears, perform the “Kill” operation.

After this, the application will be closed on an emergency basis. The advantage of using the program is that it displays processes and programs hidden from the standard Task Manager.

Method 5: radical approach

How can you close a program if it freezes? The next method is radical. There is no need to rush with it, even though it is considered the simplest. The thing is that to successfully complete programs, you need... a reboot of the operating system.

Skype won't close? How to close it? Exactly the same as all other applications. First, try all the methods listed earlier. If they do not help, then the user has no choice but to restart the computer.

It is not recommended to use Start. After all, frozen programs sometimes interfere with the corresponding operation. Instead, you need to find the Reset button on your computer and click on it. This is an emergency reboot. This option works on desktop computers. It is recommended to save all data in other applications before using it. In addition, it is worth considering that constant reboot computer does not have the best effect on the performance of the device.

Method 6: for laptops

Now it’s clear how to close a program that has frozen. The user could easily familiarize himself with examples of actions in a given case. Detailed instructions will help solve the problem.

What to do if all the previously listed methods do not help, and the person does not work for desktop computer, and behind the laptop? Or if for a number of reasons the operating system refuses to reboot even after pressing Reset?

In this case, you need to urgently shut down the operating system. But before that, save all the data on your computer. Next, press the power button on the laptop (or computer) and hold it for about 5-10 seconds. The operating system will shut down. Then you can turn on the computer and continue working with it.

The disadvantage of this method of action is its danger to the device. Frequent emergency shutdowns lead to operating system failures and hardware malfunctions. This step will not solve the problem with programs freezing. Therefore, you can use it only as a last resort.

The reader should already understand how to force close a program on Windows. All of the above methods help to bring your idea to life without much difficulty. What tips will help you avoid app freezing next time?

The most common recommendations among them are:

1. Make sure that it is the program that has frozen, and not the computer. The list of actions in one case or another will be different. Most often, when your computer freezes, an emergency reboot or shutdown helps.
2. Scan your computer for viruses. Treat it if necessary.
3. Reinstall a frozen program. Sometimes this method helps very effectively.
4. Do not open many programs and applications when working with problematic software. The less the processor is loaded, the faster certain operations will be performed on it.
5. Learn to wait. As already mentioned, sometimes processes simply take a long time to process. And so it begins to seem that computer program stuck.
6. Try all the listed methods. It is recommended to postpone rebooting and shutting down the computer as a last resort.

That's it. In fact, there is nothing difficult about ending a stuck program. All of these methods are successfully used by PC users to varying degrees.

Programs and games in Windows can freeze and slow down your computer, some quite often. There are several ways to close them - you can wait until the program “wakes up” and exit it, or call the task manager and force it to close from there.

Sometimes a program or game can seriously freeze the system, and there is no way to go to the task manager. What to do? How to close a frozen program? What other ones are there? quick ways closing programs that don't respond?

The easiest way to close the program is to use the ALT + F4 keys. Almost every computer user knows this combination. But it will not help us if the program freezes and when closing the message “Not responding” is displayed.

You can close the program through the Task Manager (press the key combination Ctrl+Shift+Esc), select the frozen application and click on the “End task” button. Sometimes forced closed program causes disruptions in Windows system and blocks the computer. A similar situation can arise in the case of closing games - when a full-screen application freezes, the only thing we can see on the screen is a black image that covers all windows.

Automatically "close" apps that don't respond

The first method is to make changes to the system settings, so that Windows automatically closes applications that are in the “Not Responding” status, that is, those that are frozen.

To enable this feature, go to Registry Editor. To do this, press the combination Windows keys+ R, enter the regedit command in the Run window and confirm its launch with Enter.
In the editor window, navigate to the following path:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Control Panel/Desktop.

Then right-click on the Desktop entry and select New - String Parameter.

We name the created parameter as AutoEndTasks, then double-click on it and assign it the value “1” to activate it. After this, you should restart the system and you're done - now all applications running under the account Windows user will close automatically when they freeze.

Closing applications using the ProcessKO utility

ProcessKO is a program that runs in background and allows you to quickly close the application using hotkeys. Despite the use of hotkeys, the closing process is different from the usual ALT + F4 key combination. In the case of ProcessKO, the application will be closed instantly in the same way as when using the Task Manager. The only difference is that the utility does not require calling any window - you just need to remember the new key combination.

After installing the program, you need to leave it running in the background (it can be launched along with the system).

You also need to enable the keyboard shortcut - open the menu in the upper left corner, then go to the “Kill Hotkey” tab and select the first option.
From now on, when the program does not close (or when we simply want to close it quickly), just press the combination CTRL + ALT + F4. This will quickly close the application without saving any changes.

How to terminate a program via the command line

Sometimes open program or processes running in the background may freeze so much that even forcefully closing it through the Task Manager in Windows 10 does not help. In this case, it will be useful to close the process using the command line.

This happens when an application or an open window freezes to such an extent that it is impossible to do anything with it. Such situations sometimes occur, and even the Windows Task Manager may have problems closing the process responsible for a given program. In such cases, we use another method to close processes running in the background - using the command line in administrator mode

Go to menu Windows Start 7 or before starting Windows screen 8.1 and enter the command in the search bar cmd. The list of found items should display the Command prompt. Right-click on it and select “Run as administrator.”

In Windows 10, right-click Start and select Command Prompt (Admin).

In the command prompt window, enter the command tasklist and confirm its execution with Enter. A table will open that lists the processes running on the computer. This is the same list that is found in the Task Manager window.

Then we look for a frozen or unnecessary program (process) in it. You need to check what PID number it has - it is displayed next to the process name in the second column. We remember the PID number and type the following command on the keyboard to force it to close:

taskkill /pid ##

Instead of “##”, enter the PID of the process that you want to close. That is, if we want to close, for example, the AvastSvc.exe process, which is assigned PID 1496 in the list, then the command would look like this:

taskkill /pid 1496

After confirming with Enter, the specified process will be closed. In the same way, we can force close a program running in the background.

Taskkill Team terminates one or more jobs or processes in operating system Windows. I'll tell you from my experience - this is very useful command cmd! Processes can be killed by process code or image name. Personally, I use the command to terminate the process tree on servers - one command can terminate 100 frozen processes, this is very convenient.

Tip - to view the current processes of the system (find out the pid of processes) on the command line, use the TASKLIST command.

TASKKILL Command Syntax and Options

taskkill ]] |

• /s computer - Specifies the name or IP address remote computer(don't use backslashes). The default is local computer.
• /u domain\user - Execute command with permissions account user, which is specified as user or domain\user. By default, the permissions of the currently logged on user on the computer from which the command is issued are used.
• /p password - Specifies the password for the user account specified by the /u parameter.
• /fi filter_name - Apply a filter to select a set of tasks.
• /pid process_code - Indicates the process code that needs to be terminated.
• /im image_name - Specifies the name of the process image to terminate. Use the wildcard (*) to specify all image names.
• /f - Indicates that the process(es) should be forced to terminate. This option has no effect on remote processes; all remote processes are terminated forcefully.
• /t - Specifies the termination of all child processes along with the parent, this action is usually known as killing the tree.
• /? - Displays help on the command line.

Examples of the TASKKILL command

• taskkill /s comp1 /f /im notepad.exe
• taskkill /s comp1 /u teplosnab\ivanov /p p@ssW23 /im *
• taskkill /s comp1/u teplosnab\ivanov/fi "USERNAME ne NT*" /im *
• taskkill /f /fi "PID ge 1000" /im *
• taskkill /pid 1230 /pid 1241 /pid 1253
• taskkill /f /fi "USERNAME eq NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM" /im notepad.exe

Doesn't cope with this task.

Sometimes you need to manually terminate a process that is not responding. In most cases, this can be done using the Windows Task Manager, but sometimes it cannot cope with an application that has gotten out of control. I often encountered this when trying to terminate an Acronis process. In this situation I usually use more powerful tool- taskkill command.

To use taskkill, you need to open a command prompt window. To do this, open the “Run” window from the “Start” menu or use the keyboard shortcut + [R] and enter “cmd” (without quotes) in the “Open” field (Fig. A).

Figure A: Open a Command Prompt window.

Using the taskkill command

The general command syntax is as follows:

Taskkill [OPTIONS] [PROCESS ID]
Of course, taskkill has a wide range of options available. I will list only the most useful of them:

/s COMPUTER, where COMPUTER is the IP or address of the remote computer. By default, the operation is performed on the local system. If this is what you are interested in, you don’t have to use this option.

/u DOMAIN\USER, where DOMAIN is the domain name and USER is the name of the user for whom you want to run the command. This option allows you to run taskkill with the rights of a specific account or domain.

/p- must be used in combination with the /u option to specify the password for the user account.

/fi- allows you to execute the taskkill command with certain filters.

/f- forcefully terminates the execution of the command.

/IM- allows you to use the application name instead of the process ID.

And of course, one of the most useful options is the switch for calling up help (Fig. B):

Taskkill/?

Figure B. Output reference information by taskkill command when using the help switch.

Terminate a process by application name

The easiest way to terminate an out-of-control process is to use the taskkill command using the /IM option. It will look like this:

Taskkill /IM APPLICATION_NAME
Here APPLICATION_NAME is the name of the process that needs to be terminated. For example, if Outlook can't close, you can use the following command:

Taskkill /IM outlook.exe
Terminating a process by ID

If you don't know the process name, but you know its PID - for example, 572 - you can use the following command:

Taskkill /PID 572
End all processes for a specific account

There is also an option to end all processes for a specific account. This is especially true if you know for sure that the problem is related to a specific account, or if the user has already logged out and the processes he started have stopped responding. In this case, you can use the following command:

Taskkill /F /FI “USERNAME eq username”
Here username is the name of the account under which the unwanted processes are running. You must include the USERNAME option in the command to specify the appropriate username.

Terminating processes on a remote computer

Another convenient feature is terminating processes remotely. Let's say you know for sure that the system is not responding due to a certain process (let's take Outlook as an example). In this case, you can use another computer and run the following command:

Taskkill /s IP ADDRESS /u DOMAIN\USER /IM Outlook.exe
Here IP ADDRESS is the address of the remote computer (you can also use the host name if the computers are able to recognize each other in this way), DOMAIN is the domain name (if required), and USER is the user name under which you logged into the remote computer.

In conclusion

The taskkill command is a very powerful and functional tool that can eliminate the need for forced reboot computer. Skillful use of this command in combination with the Task Manager extends system uptime and even allows you to fight viruses, rootkits or Trojans.

In this video we will look at the command Taskkill, which allows you to terminate certain processes from the command line in the Windows operating system. But first, as always, let’s look at why this might be needed at all.

On regular workstations this command is not particularly in demand, since you can end the process through the task manager. Although, this does not always work out and in this situation the Taskkill command is useful, but this is rather an exception to the rule.

Basically this command is used system administrators and personally I have encountered the following situations:

1) Updating programs on the terminal server - when administering a terminal server, a large number of people can run the same application. But, in most cases, when updating a program, you must first close it, i.e. complete its process. If there are not many clients, then you can use the task manager, but if there are about 100 of them, then this is already problematic. And the Taskkill command allows you to kill all processes for a specific application.

2) Automatic restart of the program - as you know, not all programs work perfectly and sometimes they freeze. What if this program must work 24 hours a day and 7 days a week, you have to periodically check its performance.

Personally, I came across the following situation: there is an online store into which product data is uploaded from 1C. But the handler is written somehow crookedly, as a result of which the exchange freezes once a day, or even every 2-3 hours. Therefore, it became necessary to forcefully restart the handler every hour, regardless of whether the program froze or not.

And so, let's move on to practice.

Let's launch the browser Google Chrome and try to complete its process ( Start\Accessories\Run\cmd \ taskkill /? - to see the command syntax)

/s COMPUTER, where COMPUTER is the IP or address of the remote computer. By default, the operation is performed on the local system. If this is what you are interested in, you don’t have to use this option.

/u DOMAIN\USER, where DOMAIN is the domain name and USER is the name of the user for whom you want to run the command. This option allows you to run taskkill with the rights of a specific account or domain.

/p- must be used in combination with the /u option to specify the password for the user account.

/fi- allows you to execute the taskkill command with certain filters.

/f- forcefully terminates the execution of the command.

/IM- allows you to use the application name instead of the process ID.

/T- completion of the process tree.

Now we need to find out the name of the application that uses this process. This can be done through the task manager ( Ctrl+ Alt+ Del\Run Task Manager\Processes\chrome. exe).

If you are unable to launch Task Manager, let's say you connected to your computer remotely via command line, then you can use the command tasklist, it also displays all processes.

Taskkill / f / im chrome. exe– force quit the application named chrome.exe

Chrome has completed its work, but the errors "The process could not be terminated, no instances of the job are running" appeared. This message appears because these processes were connected and when the main one terminated, the others automatically terminated.

Now let's launch Chrome under by different users to simulate the operation of a terminal server, for this we will launch it under a regular user and under the XP user ( Chrome \ Shift\ RMB \ Run as another user \ OK). Now we see that the same application is running under different users, let’s repeat the command Taskkill / f / im chrome. exe to check if the process will complete for all users.

Now let's try to automatically restart the application, the task scheduler will help us with this ( Start \ All Programs \ Accessories \ System Tools \ Task Scheduler \ Scheduler Library \ RMB \ Create Folder \ RestartChrome– depending on your goal)

Create a launch task ( Create a new task\Run\Run with highest rights\Trigger: scheduled, daily, starting at 11:00, repeat every hour indefinitely, enabled\Actions: launch the program,chrome\ OK)

Let's create a task to terminate the process (Create a new task \ Terminate \ Run with highest rights \ Trigger: scheduled, daily, starting at 10:59:50, repeat every hour indefinitely, enabled \ Actions: launch the program, Taskkill, additional arguments: /f / im chrome. exe\ OK)

Now let's launch Chrome and set the clock to a closer time to see how Chrome shuts down and then starts again.

However, sometimes you need to ban only a process running under a specific user. This is exactly the situation I had with the 1C processor, which uploaded product data to the site.

The fact is that you can restart frozen 1C every hour, but if you terminate all 1C processes, then everything remote users they will fly out of it, and this cannot be allowed. Therefore, you need to terminate the process running under a specific account.

To do this, add the following line to the additional arguments / fi “ username eq station-4-7” This command filters by user name and ends the process only of the one whose name matches the one specified in the filter.

Let's launch Chrome under a different user and see if the filter works.