Kill an unresponsive app in Windows.

Recently I ran across this version of xkill for Windows. xkill is a fast and very easy to use Linux program that will let you kill any misbehaving program with just a couple of mouse clicks.

When you usually try to do this with Windows, you’ll probably be going to the Task Manager and killing it from there. But sometimes the program won’t close right away and you’ll need to wait a minute or two for it to finally disappear.

The Windows version of xkill is a good idea, but did you know there is already a way to do this without installing anything? If you’re not allergic to the command line, it’s very easy to do.

The next time you have a program that freezes up and refuses to close, just try these simple steps:

1. Open a command window by clicking in the Start button, then Run, type “cmd” (without quotes), and click OK.

2. In the command window, type “tasklist” (without quotes) and hit Enter.

Now all of the processes running on your machine will scroll by in a table. Find the offensive app and note its PID in the second column. For example, if Microsoft Word was causing some trouble, I would look for winword.exe, and maybe its PID is 2700.

3. Now that we have some information, it’s time to kill it. Still in the command window, type “taskkill /PID 2700” (without the quotes) and hit Enter.

Poof! The frozen app should immediately disappear like magic.

This isn’t as clickably easy as xkill, but it’s still pretty easy to do and there’s nothing to download or install. It’s already on your machine.