Recently, my friend’s computer was attacked by a virus and his task manager stopped working. The Task Manager was opening, but it wasn’t showing any processes running at all. So to fixed that, I went through many websites and looked for number of Task Manager alternatives.

While searching, I came across a very interesting Windows XP/Command Prpmpt trick (don’t remember the site). You could actually view and kill processes from Command Prompt if your Windows Task Manager stops working for some reason.

Kill Tasks in Command Prompt

To kill the tasks from the Command Prompt, open Command Prompt by navigating to Start > All Programs > Accessories and select Command Prompt. Alternatively Command Prompt can be opened by typing cmd in Run. After you open Command Prompt, type “tasklist” (without the quotes) for a list of all the running processes. A list will be shown, and following every process name you could see a number, something like 1288. This is the PID number. You will need this to kill the task.

After looking for the process to kill, note down it’s PID number (process code) and type “tskill PID Number” without the quotes in Command Prompt. Of course, PID number should be replaced by the actual code. So the command becomes something like this: tskill 1288

That’s it. The process will be killed!

I hope you enjoyed this trick and thanks for reading this.