There are times when you just cannot take it anymore and want to kill a program that is heavily consuming system resources, not responding to user input and is just making the whole Windows system unstable in general. Usually this happens when I open many script rich sites in Firefox or when I am working with Libre Office Writer. Perhaps it is due to the fact that I do not have a very powerful computer, but nevertheless the offending programs must be terminated when they become annoying. Windows offers Task Manager tool to kill the programs, but it can be slow to respond itself. If you are looking to quickly kill or restart a process in Windows, then you can use the free ProcessKO utility.
The ProcessKO places an icon in the system tray through which you can instantly kill any of the running apps. You can right-click on the ProcessKO icon and select any of the programs from under the Instant K.O. sub-menu to kill them immediately.
You can also choose programs from under the Restart sub-menu to quickly restart them. This will first kill those applications and then start them again. This option is great when Firefox web browser is consuming too much memory and you want to quickly restart it to reduce its memory usage.
In addition to killing and restarting the applications, you can also shutdown, restart, log off, hibernate your computer. There are two modes – normal and aggressive. The normal mode gives you a little time and shows usual warnings, while the aggressive mode quickly powers off (or restarts or hibernates) your PC without waiting.
In the ProcessKO window itself, you can select any program under the KO Timer and set a timer to kill it. You can choose a time from 1 to 19 seconds for that process to be killed. You can also add some of the programs under the Favorites category so that you can access your favorite-programs-to-kill easily.
Conclusion: The ProcessKO application help you kill running processes easily or restart them instantly. This is very useful when you are facing an unresponsive program that should be killed and started again. It also comes with basic features to shutdown, restart or hibernate Windows.
You can download ProcessKO from http://www.softwareok.com/?Freeware/ProcessKO.