Kill processes using command prompt

Updated 5 April 2008: Replaced < > with | |

In Windows XP, you can always use the graphical task manager to kill the process used by the application. However, sometimes doing by the command prompt is a much quicker way, provided you know which processes you wish to kill.

Identify the process first by typing tasklist in the command prompt to list all the tasks, process ID (PID) and the memory used by the process.

To kill the process, just type tskill |PID| in the command prompt (e.g. tskill 1234).

That's it... This is the usual way I use to quickly exit a program that I know has hung. :)