process kill

Greetings,

I ran into a weird situation today and was unable to do what I had hoped to.

Without using a mouse, how can I, after launching the task manager, kill a process? For the life of me I couldn't figure this out. My mouse died and I thought it was related to the fact that the web page I was on at the time had frozen. I figured I'd just kill the page, and be all good. So, is there a way using keyboard only to select a process to kill?

WinXP Pro.

 

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Hmmmm are you doing CTRL + ALT + Delete and then going into the process tab? This is were your mouse is freezing?

 

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Yes, and no.

First, while a page was loading, mouse control stopped completely.
Then, I went ctrl+alt+del to bring up the task manager, hoping to kill FF. Couldn't do it, sans mouse.

 

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hmmmmm, so if it completely freezes like that try clicking ALT + F4 and if that does not kill it, then all I can think of is restart

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What you need to do is learn the basic Keyboard shortcut methods.

CTRL+ALT+DEL obviously brings up task manager, however whats probably obscure to most is that you can use the TAB key to select the "focus" of which element or window you are looking at. You can then use the ARROW keys to navigate through menu's. You can also find that some specific menu's or commands have a letter thats underlined. That letter is a keyboard shortcut that you can access by pressing ALT down while pressing that specific key. (You can also use the ESC key to cancel out of any dialogues you've started).

Hopefully that should be enough for you to learn how to navigate without a mouse and it can be a life saver in some very annoying instances like a flat battery.

 

If you have a USB mouse, disconnect it and reconnect.

My mouse has been randomly freezing up every few days, thats how I restart the mouse driver.

 

alt+tab will kill the currently selected item in task manager.

 

Deadly. Thank you.

However, once I get the Task Manager up, how do I then select an item?
The tabbing sequence, for example, just runs between the Process tab and the End Process button.

 

up and down directional arrows

 

Cool.

That definitely works. But I've discovered that Alt+Tab doesn't kill the selected process. It just works as it ordinarily does: cycles through active apps....

 

i can't seem to find a key combo that works.

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edit:
here are some results from MSDN
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/search/en-us/?query=xp task manager keyboard shortcuts

 

With task manager open, process tab selected, use the up or down arrow to select the process you wish to shut down. You'll notice the box on the bottom right End Process with the E underscored. Whenever you see such an underscore, that tells you that you can press the control key and that letter to do the selected action. But even then, that will bring up a box asking you if you are sure you want to end that process. Might be easier to shut FF down on the Applications tab.

 

Meta(windows button)+R to launch run. Type cmd then enter. While on command prompt, type 'taskkill /im processname.exe /f /t' or just type taskkill /? for guidance. Good luck.

 

nice
however a process list is required
"tasklist" outta work

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