Force Shut Down of Windows Service

Sometimes when you are trying to stop or restart a Windows service you get the dreaded Status of "Stopping" and through the Services GUI you are stranded with no further options. There is a command line work around that I will outline here that forces the termination of a service.

First we need to identify the Process ID or PID of the service we want to terminate or kill off. Open task manager by right clicking on a free/clear area of your Start Bar and selecting Start Task Manager. Once open, select the Processes tab. You should have something like the following example:

taskmanager

To see the Process ID column in the Task Manager click:

View > Select Columns

The following Process Page Columns screen will be displayed:

processpagecolumns

Tick the option PID (Process Identifier) as shown on the example above and click OK. Your Task manager screen with the newly added PID column should now look like this:

taskmanager3

Now we know the Process ID we want terminate we can start the kill procedure. Go to Start > Run and type in cmd and press Enter.

You will now be presented with the command prompt window.

commandprompt

At the prompt type in:

taskkill /f /pid <ThePID-YouWantToTerminate>

In the example above replace <ThePID-YouWantToTerminate> with the actual number like so:

taskkill /f /pid 1784

Hit Enter and you're done!

 

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