How can I force stop a program without using the mouse in Windows 10?
You can use the command prompt to terminate processes:
- Open the Run box using Windows+R.
- Type
cmd
in the Run box and click Enter. - Use the command
tasklist
to list all processes. - Use the command
taskkill /F /IM "executable name.exe" /T
to terminate the process.
Try the following:
- Open the Task Manager by pressing Ctrl+Shift+Esc
- Navigate using the arrow keys (↓ and ↑) to highlight the problematic process
- Press the Delete key to kill the process
- If necessary, acknowledge the subsequent prompt by selecting the appropriate choice with the arrow keys (← or →) and press Enter
A slight modification of the Taskkill answer: You can use wildcard if you don't remember/know the exact full name of the process, like so:
taskkill /f /im badproce*
It will kill all executables starting with that name, so make sure you don't just type something like s*
because that could obviously kill critical processes like svchost
.
Also, the /T
flag is for killing the tree of processes, which is the target process and all the child processes it spawned. It may not be necessary most of the time.