Taskkill Replacement for Windows XP Home

"taskkill works great in XP Pro, but how do you accomplish the same thing on XP Home system?"

If you want to quickly kill off running processes from the command line in Windows XP Professional, taskkill.exe is a great way to get the job done. XP Home does not include this utility, only including the more limited tkill.exe instead. Microsoft does provide a free solution to this via their acquisition of the Sysinternals team.

One of the best tool collections from Sysinternals is the PsTools collection, which was originally designed to ad functionality to Windows NT and Windows 2000 administration found in newer servers. pskill.exe is bundled as part of that collection, offering a solution very similar to taskkill.exe for taking control of processes both on the local machine and for remote administration.

Here's a quick overview of how it works:

Usage: pskill [- ] [-t] [\\computer [-u username] [-p password]]
- Displays the supported options.

-t Kill the process and its descendants.

\\computer Specifies the computer on which the process you want to terminate is executing. The remote computer must be accessible via the network neighborhood.

-u username To kill a process on a remote system when the account you are using lacks administrative privileges on the remote system, login as administrator using this command-line option. If you leave out the -p option PsKill prompts you for the password.

-p password Specify the login password on the command line so that you can use PsList from batch files.

process id Specifies the process ID of the process you want to kill.

process name Specifies the process name of the process or processes you want to kill.

Download pskill as part of pstools