Three Quick and Different Windows Tips

The tips below should work in any version of Windows from Windows 7 through Windows 10. Enjoy!

Edit user accounts using the command line

Open a command prompt. On Windows 7, type CMD in the start menu search, then click CMD when it appears at the top. In Windows 8.1, right-click the start button and click Command Prompt.  In Windows 10, type CMD in the taskbar search and press enter.

Type control userpasswords2 at the prompt, and press Enter.

——————–

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:

Open a Command prompt. 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?

————————–

Create a shortcut to Task Manager

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), or you can type taskmgr in command line and press Enter.

But 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 want to launch Task Manager, just click your new shortcut.