How to Force Close a Program on Windows Without Task Manager

In this tutorial, we are going to see how to force close a program on Windows without Task Manager. A program does not respond and refuses to close? You click on the cross at the top right of the window but nothing happens, the program window remains open? In this case, to force the program to close, you will have to kill the process associated with the program.

A process is a running program. It is an active entity that performs all the tasks of a program. For example, when you start Word, a process is created to perform the tasks of the Word program. If you open another Word window, a new process will be created.

Each process running on Windows is assigned a unique number called a process ID or PID.

By killing a process, you will automatically force the program to which the process is linked to close.
 

Method 1: How to Force Close a Program on Windows Using Command prompt

To kill a process with the command prompt (and force a program to stop), follow these instructions:

Step 1: Open the command prompt.
 

 

 
Step 2: Type tasklist command to see a list of all running processes. Make a note of the image name and PID of the process (e.g. WINWORD.exe / 1136) you wish to kill.
 

 
You can filter the processes with findstr:

tasklist | findstr /i "word"

 
Step 3: Kill the process with taskkill by specifying the name of the image:

taskkill /f /im WINWORD.EXE

 
Or the process ID :

taskkill /f /pid 25484

 
Congratulations! You have forced the closure of one application on Windows with the command prompt and taskkill command.
 

 
 

Method 2: How to Force Close a Program on Windows Using PowerShell

To kill a process with PowerShell (and force a program to stop), follow these instructions:

Step 1: Open PowerShell.
 

 
Step 2: Type ps command to see a list of all running processes. Make a note of the name and ID of the process (e.g. WINWORD.exe / 6748) you wish to kill.
 

 
Step 3: You can filter the processes like this:

ps *word*

 

 
Step 4: Kill the process with Stop-Process by specifying the process name:

Stop-Process -Name "WINWORD" -Force

 
Or by the process ID :

Stop-Process -ID 6748 -Force

 
Congratulations! You have forced the closure of one application on Windows with PowerShell and Stop-Process command.