What is the proper way to close unresponsive processes?

Stop-Process command does the same as Taskkill command, terminating process only ends Ram space taken by the process it will not cause harm to registry.

FreeBooter said:

Stop-Process command does the same as Taskkill command, terminating process only ends Ram space taken by the process it will not cause harm to registry.

That is not what I read on superuser and from power users on forums tho. Can you give source? I didn't find much currently. But I was searching it before multiple times under different keywords.

Paul Black said:

Using PowerShell, do you mean this => Stop-Process -Name "ProcessName" -Force

Hello, yep I meant this. User above says it is the same thing, I read it has some other params, but wasn't sure, if it is the same thing, or not!

There are essentially 2 ways to end a process:

1. You can ask the process to close itself. This is the safe way. There are often things a process will do before it closes, and these are things only the developer knows. These include updating registry entries and flushing file buffers. Nothing outside the process can do these things. If the process is not responding this method is not possible because you can't ask it to do anything. All you can do is wait as the not responding state may be temporary. There is no way of knowing how long.

2. You can forcefully terminate the process. taskkill /f does this. There is an element of risk in this. Microsoft talks about this in the developer documentation. The problem here is that the process is never aware that it about to be killed and has no opportunity to intervene in the process and can't do the normal shutdown procedure.

Windows provides multiple ways of doing these methods but they all end up doing either #1, or #2.

Usually the risks of doing #2 are minimal. But they do exist.

A new way of killing a process has been added into this tutorial: Kill a Process in Windows 10
The command can kill a process that cannot be killed by Taskkill.exe
I used it to kill a stubborn process being used by an unwanted service running in the background.

This is the proper way to do it:

Matthew Wai said:

A new way of killing a process has been added into this tutorial: Kill a Process in Windows 10
The command can kill a process that cannot be killed by Taskkill.exe
I used it to kill a stubborn process being used by an unwanted service running in the background.

You mean WMIC? I need alternative of

Code:

taskkill.exe /F /FI "status eq NOT RESPONDING"

When program is not responding, program name wouldn't work, since I can't see into the future

hdmi said:

This is the proper way to do it:

I don't trust programs from sites like this. It has been known for pup, or possibly adware. What method it uses BTW? Why couldn't I run this from PS etc.

Otherwise it is strange, there would be no safe way to kill processes on Windows 10. This crap happens all the time, if you alt tab from a game, or games freeze by themselves relatively a lot!

empleat said:

When program is not responding, program name wouldn't work

Next time when a program is not responding, try WMIC and see whether it works.
I don't have a non-responding program, so I can't try it.

f14tomcat said:

Not a perfect solution, but if the process has a parent process, terminate the parent and that will usually gracefully terminate the tree. Also, depending on the process tree, Process Explorer from SYSINTERNALS will gracefully terminate a process, even frozen ones. Last one I can think of now would be to restart Explorer.

Problem is this has to be automated, I currently use PS script to call taskkill by keypress. It terminates process which has status = not responding. So I can't exactly choose, as I don't see into future, which process won't respond.

Matthew Wai said:

Next time when a program is not responding, try WMIC and see whether it works.
I don't have a non-responding program, so I can't try it.

When it is not responding I can't write, or do anything...