Been a while since I’ve been on Windows but I distinctly remember some button to kill a task without waiting. Maybe they removed it to make Windows soooo much more user friendly.
Off the top of my head: right click the task and hit end process. That has literally never failed me. Back in windows XP it might sometimes not actually kill the process but then there was always the “kill process tree” button to fall back on.
Yep, typically “Kill Process Tree” was like the nuke from orbit. You’ll likely destroy any unsaved data, but it works nice when steam has 12 processes running at once.
It’s not really a nuke as some processes might be protected. The nuke is to use debugger privileges. Far Manager can kill processes using debugger privileges, that will literally nuke anything and in an instant: the app won’t even receive any signals or anything.
The normal Windows task manager’s ‘end task’ button just politely asks the app to close - but then later will tell the user if the app is unresponsive, and offer to brutally murder it instead.
There is also the sysinternals Process Monitor, which is basically ‘expert’ version of the task manager. Procmon does allow you to just kill a task outright.
The end task doesn’t terminate the app, it only sends a message to the window to close itself. The app will then decide what to do on its own. For example, if the app has multiple windows open, it might close the active one, but still continue running with other windows open. Or it might ignore the message completely.
Clicking end task in windows task manager has definitely let the hanging task live in its non-responsive state for multiple hours before.
Been a while since I’ve been on Windows but I distinctly remember some button to kill a task without waiting. Maybe they removed it to make Windows soooo much more user friendly.
Off the top of my head: right click the task and hit end process. That has literally never failed me. Back in windows XP it might sometimes not actually kill the process but then there was always the “kill process tree” button to fall back on.
Yep, typically “Kill Process Tree” was like the nuke from orbit. You’ll likely destroy any unsaved data, but it works nice when steam has 12 processes running at once.
It’s not really a nuke as some processes might be protected. The nuke is to use debugger privileges. Far Manager can kill processes using debugger privileges, that will literally nuke anything and in an instant: the app won’t even receive any signals or anything.
The normal Windows task manager’s ‘end task’ button just politely asks the app to close - but then later will tell the user if the app is unresponsive, and offer to brutally murder it instead.
There is also the sysinternals Process Monitor, which is basically ‘expert’ version of the task manager. Procmon does allow you to just kill a task outright.
The end task doesn’t terminate the app, it only sends a message to the window to close itself. The app will then decide what to do on its own. For example, if the app has multiple windows open, it might close the active one, but still continue running with other windows open. Or it might ignore the message completely.