CyberNotes: Shortcuts to End Processes and Programs

Dec 13

CyberNotes: Shortcuts to End Processes and Programs

Tutorial Thursday

Over in the CyberNet forum, Pieter posted an awesome tip for Linux users where you can actually create a shortcut to forcefully terminate an application. This is handy in situations where a program, such as Firefox, freezes up and won’t shutdown. I figured there had to be a way to do this in Windows as well, and so I started searching around.

Almost every site that I found recommended using the taskkill (instructions) command line option, which is rather easy to create a shortcut for since it is built-in to Windows. Doing taskkill /f /im firefox.exe would be the command needed to “forcefully” close Firefox at a moments notice, but I found one flaw with it. Sometimes it is handy being able to forcefully close Firefox even when it’s not frozen, because then you know the next time you start the browser it will ask whether you want to restore your tabs and windows.

What I found with taskkill was that if a program wasn’t frozen it would gracefully close it. That might be nice in some cases, but when you use this with Firefox you won’t get the option to restore your session the next time you start the browser. Don’t worry, I wasn’t about to give up! With the help of a very small (just 6.5KB) free program it will take under a minute to setup.

Note: These instructions are written for Vista, but should be similar in all versions of Windows.

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