Brief History of the Application

The idea of KillProcess came up during development of another much larger and more complex application.
This application would spawn a lot of other processes, and also depended on other applications spawning their own processes to communicate with the main application. A general run of this nasty application would start up something like 7 different processes all over Windows, all depending on eachother. This was a real pain while still in development, since the main application would behave rather strangly and crash or hang alot (like 40 times a day).
This all ment that it would literally take forever to clean up the orphan processes all of the time (since they where GUI-less). This was why KillProcess was born.

KillProcess lets you create an list of processes that should be destroyed and then perform an "batch-type" run on the list, killing of all of the processes listed.

The KillProcess application can terminate almost any application on an PC running Microsoft Windows, including Windows Services and applications being debugged (but not while at a breakpoint) in a matter of millisecond. This is more powerful than the Windows TaskManager, which also has an delay to wait for applications to "die" gracefully. KillProcess is also free from stupid questions that asks you if you are really sure that you now what you are doing (well there actually is such questions, but you can disable them). The Windows TaskManager also cannot terminate multiple processes at the same time, which is something that KillProcess is really good at! Either have the processes in your kill list, or select them in the process list and "kill" them manually.

KillProcess includes a nifty process tracker, which can prevent any process in the system from starting to execute, and thus releasing precious CPU resources to applications that should be running instead. This is great if you for some reason would like to prevent the network administrator from running a nasty virus scan application on your computer while you are making a huge animation or code compilation that consumes a lot of computer resources.

How the application works

The application uses "Kill lists" to specify which processes that should be terminated. It is possible to have several lists on the PC and then select which list the application should use. The application then uses the methods in the PSAPI included in the Microsoft Platform SDK

The kill list contains the full names of the processes to be terminated - or as I prefer to call it - killed.
So if you for example want to terminate Microsoft Word swiftly, simply add Winword.exe to your kill list and fire away.

The application will kill any process that is included in the kill list,including some services and applications being debugged (which is VERY useful).

Each process on the kill list can also be "tagged" by the application. This will make the Kill Process app terminate the undesired application as soon as it spawns. This is done trough continuously polling the PSAPI for a new process list, and compare the new applications against the kill list. The polling time can be defined by the user, in order to tune the usage of the CPU.

Brief Overview of KillProcess

Main Window

There is a main window, from where you easily can start terminating processes. The application provides you with basic process information to make it possible for you to determine what processes to kill. It is also possible to get more extensive process information from this window. Processes can easily be added to or removed from the kill list from this window.

Application Preferences

There is an settings dialog, from where all of the applications various settings can be accessed. The application can be customized in many ways to suite your special needs. The default settings are certainly not suitable for everone!

Editing Kill Lists

This is the place where you add processes to your kill list. Adding processes is as easy as typing in their name, or browsing for the executables. This is also the place where you can tag your processes for instant termination as soon as they appear in the running process list.

Tray Icon or System tray Access