To kill a “not responding” program, you usually have to open the Windows Task Manager, find the program, right-click and choose End Process. But if there’s one particular program which almost always misbehaves and requires you to perform these steps over and over again (Oracle Sql Developer? Anybody?) – here’s a short tutorial on how you can create a Windows Shortcut to kill unresponsive programs with a click of the mouse.

Let’s for example create a shortcut for killing Firefox.

Find the name of the process in the Windows Task Manager

  1. Start the program that you want to create a shortcut for (Firefox in this example)
  2. Press Ctrl+Alt+Del and choose Start Task Manager.
  3. Look for the instance of the running program in the processes tab. Note down the name of the process.
    Find the name of the process

Create a shortcut to kill the program

  1. Right-click on the desktop and choose New > Shortcut.
  2. In the location of the item box, type the following: 
    taskkill.exe /F /IM firefox.exe

    The /IM needs to be followed up with the name of the process you want to kill.

    Enter the command in the location box

  3. Press Next and Finish.

Done. Now in order to kill un-responsive Firefox, all you have to do is double click on this shortcut.

You can also create a shortcut to kill multiple programs by appending more /IM <process name> statements at the end. Like for example:

taskill.exe /F /IM firefox.exe /IM chrome.exe /IM iexplore.exe

will immediately stop all instances of Firefox, Chrome and Internet Explorer on double clicking the shortcut.

The /F flag is used to force the termination of the program. If you wish a graceful termination of the program, you can remove the /F flag. Although, during graceful termination, the program may need user intervention to tell it how it should handle the already open files, websites etc. For example, a notepad session on graceful termination will ask if it should save changes to the document.

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