Three Rare Windows Tips

The tips below should work in any version of Windows from Windows XP through Windows 10. Enjoy!

Taskkill

Windows  borrows a feature from Linux. Taskkill allows you to terminate a running process (program) from the command line. Here’s how you use it:

Click Start/Run and type Command. The command utility window opens.

Type Tasklist at the prompt. You’ll see a list of running processes. Next to each process you’ll see a PID number. To kill any running task, type Taskkill /PID xxx (where xxx represents the PID number of the task you want to terminate).

Why would you want to use this? Because you can? Or maybe your computer is frozen and you can’t access Task Manager. Or maybe just for fun?

Edit user accounts using the command line

Click Start/Run. Type “control userpasswords2” (without the quotes) in the command line, and press Enter.

Create a shortcut for easy access to Task Manger

You can access Task Manager by right-clicking on your taskbar and choosing Task Manager, you can user CTRL+SHIFT+ESC, or you can use the three-finger salute (CTRL+ALT+DELETE). Did you know that you can also create a shortcut to Task Manager and leave it on your desktop, drag it to your quick launch toolbar, or taskbar (Windows 7 & newer) or put in on your start menu? You can, and it’s easy to do.

Right-click on your desktop and choose “New” “Shortcut” and copy and paste the following (in bold) into the “type location of the item” field:

%windir%\system32\taskmgr.exe

Once you’re created your shortcut, you can drag its icon to your start menu, quick launch bar, taskbar (Windows 7, Windows 8.x, Windows 10) or simply leave it on your desktop. The next time you need to launch Task Manager, just click your new shortcut.