[windows] Really killing a process in Windows

Occasionally a program on a Windows machine goes crazy and just hangs. So I'll call up the task manager and hit the "End Process" button for it. However, this doesn't always work; if I try it enough times then it'll usually die eventually, but I'd really like to be able to just kill it immediately. On Linux I could just kill -9 to guarantee that a process will die.

This also could be used for writing batch scripts and writing batch scripts is programming.

Is there some program or command that comes with Windows that will always kill a process? A free third-party app would be fine, although I'd prefer to be able to do this on machines I sit down at for the first time.

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The answer is


Process Hacker has numerous ways of killing a process.

(Right-click the process, then go to Miscellaneous->Terminator.)


One trick that works well is to attach a debugger and then quit the debugger.

On XP or Windows 2003 you can do this using ntsd that ships out of the box:

ntsd -pn myapp.exe

ntsd will open up a new window. Just type 'q' in the window to quit the debugger and take out the process.

I've known this to work even when task manager doesn't seem able to kill a process.

Unfortunately ntsd was removed from Vista and you have to install the (free) debbugging tools for windows to get a suitable debugger.


setup an AT command to run task manager or process explorer as SYSTEM.

AT 12:34 /interactive "C:/procexp.exe"

If process explorer was in your root C drive then this would open it as SYSTEM and you could kill any process without getting any access denied errors. Set this for like a minute in the future, then it will pop up for you.


When ntsd access is denied, try:

ZeroWave was designed to be a simple tool that will provide a multilevel termination of any kind of process.

ZeroWave is also a easy-to-use program due to its simple installation and its very friendly graphical interface.

ZeroWave has three termination modes and with the "INSANE" mode can terminate any kind of process that can run on Windows.

It seems that ZeroWave can't kill avp.exe


Get process explorer from sysinternals (now Microsoft)

Process Explorer - Windows Sysinternals | Microsoft Docs


taskkill /im myprocess.exe /f

The "/f" is for "force". If you know the PID, then you can specify that, as in:

taskkill /pid 1234 /f

Lots of other options are possible, just type taskkill /? for all of them. The "/t" option kills a process and any child processes; that may be useful to you.


JosepStyons is right. Open cmd.exe and run

taskkill /im processname.exe /f

If there is an error saying,

ERROR: The process "process.exe" with PID 1234 could not be terminated. Reason: Access is denied.

then try running cmd.exe as administrator.


FYI you can sometimes use SYSTEM or Trustedinstaller to kill tasks ;)

google quickkill_3_0.bat

sc config TrustedInstaller binPath= "cmd /c TASKKILL /F  /IM notepad.exe
sc start "TrustedInstaller"