KillProcess

CNET Editors' review

by: CNET staff on September 28, 2010

One of the first things you learn when you start using Windows is Control+Alt+Delete, that magic combination of keys that brings up the Task Manager and lets you kill programs and processes that are frozen or otherwise running amok. Sometimes, though, even the Task Manager isn't up to the task. KillProcess is a simple utility that, as its name implies, can knock out pesky processes that Task Manager can't handle.

The program's interface is fairly intuitive, displaying a list of active processes and, across the bottom, several buttons for dealing with them. Users can kill individual processes or create lists of processes that can be killed all at once. Processes that are on a "kill list" can also be resurrected if desired. KillProcess comes with an options menu that lets users customize its behavior to some extent; users can, for example, set the program to run on startup or to suppress errors. The program comes with a decent Help file that, while not incredibly detailed, should be adequate for most users. We tried KillProcess with multiple processes and it terminated them immediately, which we thought was a nice change from futilely clicking the End Process button in Task Manager. It is true that disabling critical processes can cause some serious problems if you don't know what you're doing, so novices should be careful about killing processes that they're not familiar with. But for users who know what they need to kill and why, KillProcess works just fine.

KillProcess installs and uninstalls without issues. We recommend this program to all users.