Task Kill vs Stop Process: Manage Windows PID Effectively

PID (Process ID) is a short form for process identifiers. A PID is a unique number that identifies each running process in an operating system, such as Linux, Unix, macOS, and Microsoft Windows. Task Killer can help you to kill (close or stop) the running apps of your device by ending one or more tasks or processes. Please see User account and process management in Linux, Handy Shutdown commands available in Windows, and How to stop Windows from applying updates.

Processes can be ended by PID or image name and Taskkill has replaced the kill tool. In this article, we shall discuss “Task Kill vs Stop Process: How to search for a service PID”.

Note: In order to kill a process via the Command Prompt or PowerShell, you need an Administrator (elevated) privilege.

Reasons to forcefully kill or stop a process in Windows

As an Administrator from time to time, you may need to kill a service that is problematic and stuck or start a service that has refused to start.

Killing a service that is stuck or has refused to start will save you the time of restarting or rebooting a Server.

Please see How to Launch macOS Activity Monitor (Task Manager) from the Utility and Terminal (Command Line), How to stop an application from starting up automatically on macOS, and How to Delete Quick Heal Anti-virus cfrbackup folder.

How to Kill a Process?

To have this done, you will need to search for the PID of the service. To determine the name of a service, this can be found in the following ways.

From the “services.msc” window (Also from the Task Manager, You can also access the services tab).

To determine the service PID, I will be using the “sc queryex” command to query the service name of the application. lso, launch Command Prompt with Administrators privilege and run tasklist to see all of the running processes.

A screenshot of the Windows Command Prompt displaying a list of running processes along with their respective PID, session number, and memory usage.

Note: Since the list might be very long, you can use a pipe character with more command as shown below

tasklist | more

Steps for querying a service name

Launch an elevated Command Prompt (CMD): Use the following command below with the service name from the command prompt.

sc queryex servicename

A screenshot of the Windows Command Prompt displaying service details for 'drivelock'. It includes information such as service name, type, state, exit codes, and process ID.

Kill a service

To kill a service, launch the command prompt, the PID is paramount as this will be used to kill the service. See the images above on how to obtain the process ID (PID).

Launch an elevated Command Prompt and
Type the following command below to kill the service

taskkill /f /pid [PID]

Where [PID] is the value associated the service name as shown above.

Command prompt displaying a process termination command with a success message for process ID 1292.

Note: The /f flag is used to kill the process forcefully. Failure to use the /F flag will result in nothing happening in some cases

Alternatively, we can also use the Task Manager to kill a service. For more information on using the Task Manager.

Task Manager window showing the Details tab with a list of running processes. The DriveLock.exe process is highlighted, displaying its PID, status, user name, CPU usage, memory usage, and UAC virtualization status. The 'End Task' option is visible at the bottom right.

Note: Ensure absolute care is taken on what service you are killing though.

If you kill a critical Windows service you may end up forcing the machine to reboot on its own in order to have this it resolved.

Filtering options available to Taskkill

Below are other filtering options variables and operators that can be used with “taskkill”.

Variables	Operators
STATUS	eq (equals)
IMAGENAME	ne (not equal)
PID	gt (greater than)
SESSION	lt (less than)
CPUTIME	ge (greater than or equal)
MEMUSAGE	le (less than or equal)
MODULES
Services
WINDOWSTITLE

These variables and operators can be used with the /FI filtering flag.

Example 1

You wish to end all processes that has a window title that starts with “DriveBit”:

taskkill /FI "WINDOWTITLE eq DriveBit*" /F

Example 2

Kill all the process running under a user account

taskkill /FI "USERNAME eq Administrator" /F

Example 3

Kill a service running on a remote desktop (server)

			
taskkill /S AnsibleServer /U RemoteAccountName /P RemoteAccountPassword /IM chrome.exe /F

Please see Process Explorer (SysInternal Tools), how to use SysInternals Live Tools, how to download and use Windows SysInternals tools locally, and Process Explorer (Replace built-in Task Manager).

Killing a process via PowerShell

To Kill a process via PowerShell is somewhat similar to killing a process using CMD. You also need elevated (Admin rights) to have this done.

Launch PowerShell as an Administrator. Type the command Get-Process to see the list of running processes as shown below

Get-Process

1: To kill a process by its name: Execute the following cmdlet as shown below.

Stop-Process -Name "ProcessName" -Force

To kill a process by its PID, run the command as shown below.

Stop-Process -ID PID -Force

I hope you found this blog post helpful on “Task Kill vs Stop Process: How to search for a service PID”. If you have any questions, please let me know in the comment session.