Windows 10: What is the proper way to close unresponsive processes?

I used taskkill so far to kill unresponsive processes: Code: taskkill.exe /F /FI "status eq NOT RESPONDING" However I read this is not a safe way to close process! It could mess up registry, or Windows, or program data!!! There is also cmdlet: Stop-Process, it works similarly. But I have no idea, if this is any better. Still you need to force process to close, otherwise it won't close! Taskkill might be still better than hard restart tho! Games freeze a lot of times on alt-tab, or bug... This saved me from hardrestart many times!

:)

 

What is the proper way to close unresponsive processes?

This is the proper way to do it:

 

What is the proper way to close unresponsive processes?

You mean WMIC? I need alternative of Code:

When program is not responding, program name wouldn't work, since I can't see into the future *Biggrin

I don't trust programs from sites like this. It has been known for pup, or possibly adware. What method it uses BTW? Why couldn't I run this from PS etc.

Otherwise it is strange, there would be no safe way to kill processes on Windows 10. This crap happens all the time, if you alt tab from a game, or games freeze by themselves relatively a lot!

 

What is the proper way to close unresponsive processes?

There are essentially 2 ways to end a process:

1. You can ask the process to close itself. This is the safe way. There are often things a process will do before it closes, and these are things only the developer knows. These include updating registry entries and flushing file buffers. Nothing outside the process can do these things. If the process is not responding this method is not possible because you can't ask it to do anything. All you can do is wait as the not responding state may be temporary. There is no way of knowing how long.

2. You can forcefully terminate the process. taskkill /f does this. There is an element of risk in this. Microsoft talks about this in the developer documentation. The problem here is that the process is never aware that it about to be killed and has no opportunity to intervene in the process and can't do the normal shutdown procedure.

Windows provides multiple ways of doing these methods but they all end up doing either #1, or #2.

Usually the risks of doing #2 are minimal. But they do exist.