Taskkill
Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7 borrow a feature from Linux. Taskkill allows you to terminate a running process (program) from the command line. Here’s how you use it:
In Windows XP
Click Start/Run and type CMD and press Enter. The command utility window opens.
Or Windows Key + R and type CMD and press Enter.
For Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8:
Click Start / Type CMD in start menu search, right-click on the CMD icon when it appears at the top and choose “Run as Administrator”
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) 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) or simply leave it on your desktop. The next time you need to launch Task Manager, just click your new shortcut.
Just testing….
On a related topic, I also found it helpful to create a shortcut to Command Prompt in a folder where I had downloaded a bunch of WMP visualizations. For the ones that worked (or didn’t work) I had to register (or unregister) a .dll. Rather than type in the filepath to that folder each time, by placing Command Prompt in the folder, the filepath was already there.
you actually have to type cmd not command after start –>run.
Thanks for the GREAT tip.
The tip has been corrected and updated for Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8.