This post explains the steps users can take to kill or end a process in Windows 11.
If you have a hung or runaway app’s process impacting system performance, you can use Windows Task Manager to kill or end the process.
Windows also provides other means to kill a program’s process using the taskkill command or the Stop-Process command using the Command Prompt and Windows PowerShell.
Below, we will show you how to kill or end a process in Windows 11.
Kill a process using Windows Task Manager
As mentioned above, using Windows Task Manager app, one can use it to monitor and manage programs and processes.
To use Task Manager to kill a process, first open Windows Task Manager. There are multiple ways to open the Task Manager in Windows.
You can press CTRL + SHIFT + Esc to open it or CTRL + ALT + DELETE and select Task Manager from the screen that appears.
Once the Task Manager app opens, click More details to expand it. On the expanded and detailed window, click on the Process tab.
Next, select a parent process (App name) you want to kill and do want of the following:
- Press the Delete key on your keyboard to kill the process
- Right-click on the process, select End task or click on the End task button at the top right.
If you don’t want to kill the parent process, expand it, then use the steps above to kill the child process without impacting the parent.
When you do that, you will get a pop-up window asking to confirm that you wish to kill or end the process.
Kill process with Taskkill command
Another way to kill or end a process is to use the Command Prompt or the Windows PowerShell app using the Taskkill command.
First, list all the current processes using the tasklist command.
tasklist
The tasklist command will list all Windows processes and provide a list similar to the one below:
Image Name PID Session Name Session# Mem Usage ========================= ======== ================ =========== ============ System Idle Process 0 Services 0 8 K System 4 Services 0 144 K Registry 108 Services 0 40,012 K smss.exe 408 Services 0 1,148 K csrss.exe 572 Services 0 6,140 K wininit.exe 644 Services 0 8,624 K msedge.exe 652 Console 1 26,528 K winlogon.exe 740 Console 1 12,280 K
Now with the list handy, run the taskkill command format below to kill a process.
Kill a process:
taskkill /IM Image Name /F
Kill a process and child processes
taskkill /IM Image Name /T /F
For example, run the commands below to kill the msedge.exe listed under the Image Name column.
taskkill /IM msedge.exe /F
Alternatively, you can kill a process using the process PID. For example, run the commands below to kill the msedge.exe PID.
taskkill /PID 652 /F
Kill a process using the Stop-Process command
Yet another way to kill or end a process is to use the Stop-Process command in the PowerShell app. The Get-Process command will list all running processes similar to the tasklist command.
Run the command below to list all running processes:
Get-Process
The command above will list all processes and provide a list similar to the one below.
Handles NPM(K) PM(K) WS(K) CPU(s) Id SI ProcessName
------- ------ ----- ----- ------ -- -- -----------
140 10 1988 10224 4700 0 AggregatorHost
245 12 6516 15264 1.19 8312 0 audiodg
248 12 2808 16096 0.27 4308 1 backgroundTaskHost
573 21 1948 6120 572 0 csrss
396 18 2460 26036 652 1 csrss
466 18 4544 23592 2.25 3440 1 msedge
313 16 4124 15636 4348 0 dllhost
283 28 6972 19276 1.25 6688 1 dllhost
With the process list handy, use the Stop-Process command format below to kill a process.
Stop-Process -Name "ProcessName" -Force
For example, to kill msedge process name, run the commands below.
Stop-Process -Name "msedge" -Force
The Stop-Process command can also kill a process using the process ID. You can kill the msedge process using its ID.
Stop-Process -ID 3440 -Force
You can also include multiple processes by adding the process name or ID followed by the next.
Example:
Stop-Process -ID PID,PID,PID -Force taskkill /PID PID /PID PID /F
That should do it!
Conclusion:
This post showed you how to kill or end a process in Windows 11. If you find any errors above or have something to add, please use the comment form below.
