How to Kill a process in Windows 10

Why kill a process? What is the need of killing it?. If this question arises in your mind, then I think you might be affected by the slow computing performance of your system. Basically,  it is due to the running of some unwanted process in your system. So, you first need to know what is a process??

A process is a part of a program that is running on a computer system. It is executed when a certain program gets initiated. A process contains multiple threads which create subprocess or a child process. 

If you find any process which is affecting your system’s performance or if any process is not responding properly, then you need to kill that process. For performing this task, you must know how to kill a process in Windows 10. Basically there are two ways to do the same:

Using A Task Manager: Task Manager is a startup manager that lists all the running processes, it grants permission to create a task as well as it allows to kill a single process at a time.
    
Using Command Prompt: Through Command prompt, you can kill tasks more effectively, and you can also kill multiple processes at the same time. That’s why this can be the most preferred option to kill processes simultaneously.

Steps to Kill a process in Windows 10

Method 1 of 2:

Step 1: Type “Task Manager” in Windows search bar. You’ll see Task Manager app, just click on it to open.

Step 2: Now, Select the application or process that you want to kill, for that just right click on that particular process, you’ll find “End Task” option. Click on it to stop the process.

Method 2 of 2:

Step 1: Type “cmd” in Windows search bar, the “cmd” stands for Command Prompt, Just right-click on it and choose “Run as administrator” as shown in the image below.

Step 2: Now, a black screen appears, that is the command prompt, First type the command “tasklist” to view all the tasks which are currently running.

You will get the list of all tasks as shown in the figure below.

Step 3: If you directly type the command “taskkill /taskname/F” as I wrote “taskkill /notepad.exe/F”, where F stands for forcefully, then that task will not end as you have not entered the type of file. Hence, You”ll get the error as an invalid argument.

To know about the type of file, run the command “TASKKILL / ?”.

Step 4: Parameter list will appear on your screen, read it properly. For an example, if you need to stop notepad then you need to type “IM” before notepad.exe, where IM stands for the image name.

Step 5: As, I want to kill a notepad process, i.e., notepad.exe, so I just typed “taskkill / IM notepad.exe and pressed enter.

The message “Sent termination signal to the process notepad.exe with PID 4624” will appear as shown in the figure. Here PID means Process id which was defined by the computer system.

NOTE:

• If you know the “Process ID of a particular task, then run the command “Taskkill /PID 4624 /F”  where “4624” is the PID of notepad in my system, you just need to enter the PID of the respective process you want to kill.
• If you want to kill two or more than two processes at the same time, then you simply have to enter the process ID, one after the other with the prefix PID., For, e.g.,.“Taskkill /PID 2704 5472 4344 /F”.

That’s all guys. Keep reading..!!