Task Manager provides two ways to kill a process. The namby-pamby, I-want-to-be-nice-to-this-process-even-though-I-hate-it way, which is to choose “End Task” on the entry in the “Applications” tab, and the good way, which is to go to the “Processes” tab and choose “End Process” on the specific program you’re having trouble with. It’s pretty rare that the latter method doesn’t work immediately.
And in order to help you figure out which process to kill, since the window may be titled “Joe Blow - Conversation” when the actual process is communicator.exe, you can go to the Applications tab, right-click on the item, and choose “Go to process”, which takes you to the Processes tab and selects the process that you want to kill.
What annoys me is that frequently the applications tab will be blank, supposedly with nothing running, but there will still be some nasty leftover process that needs to be killed. At my workPC, there are usually a gazillion mystery processes running with helpfully descriptive names like “tpsct4psx.exe” :rolleyes:
Even this wouldn’t be so bad if Windows shipped with some real documentation on disk, of the kind that listed what each program is, does, and accepts as arguments. You could bring up a command prompt (a low-resource task, I hope) and navigate through some brand-new form of online manual pages written for people who know what they’re doing and want to get work done.
My main point of reference is Linux, which does ship with such documentation. I guess there is a good reason Windows does not but it escapes me at the moment.
Yeah, except the documentation in the official Help system doesn’t contain anything like the technical detail of the Linux manual pages and info system. Plus, it isn’t nearly as easy to navigate if you already know the name of the program.
I’m beating a dead horse on this one and I’ll quit, but it always pissed me off that MS never thought it would be useful to give the people who bought their OS sufficient documentation to use it on their own.