There are so many times when a program stops responding because it is hogging up all the system resources. Most of the time, this is due to bad program design or hardware failure but it could also be due to special circumstances that the program developers were not able to think of. In those times, you have no other choice but to terminate or kill those programs.
In Windows, there are two official ways to kill any program or process – one is through the Task Manager and another is through the command prompt window (cmd.exe). For the former, you have to first launch the Task Manager, then find the process from the list and then click on the End Task button. For the latter, you have to launch a “cmd.exe” prompt with the Administrator access and then give the command taskkill provided that you know the process name or its ID.
Problem with both of these methods is that they do not allow you to force close any program very quickly and you have to know the process name in advance to use them. For example, if you want to close an unresponsive Firefox window, then you should know about the respective “firefox.exe” process.
But if you use a third-party open-source tool called Kill then everything becomes very easy. Kill is a small but genius tool that can simplify terminating any open window with ease. It is a portable tool and comes with the AutoHotKey source code in the ZIP archive. When you launch Kill.exe, your mouse pointer turns into a skull icon. You can now move the skull mouse pointer over any visible window and it will be quickly closed.
If you want to cancel without closing any window, then press the Esc key on your keyboard. If you want to force close (aka kill) a window, then press Ctrl when clicking on that window. If you want to quickly access the Kill tool, then you can pin it to your Windows Taskbar. But remember to be careful when using this tool, it won’t ask you for any confirmation or give you any warning – it just kills a open window without asking any questions.
You can download the Kill tool from http://www.dcmembers.com/skrommel/download/kill/.