Windows xKill

Did you ever have a program that you had real difficulty closing after it hung up?

Windows xKill is a small (18 kb) download that will make your life a LOT easier to kill a rogue program. I have had a problem with Thunderbird trying to install an update and going into an endless loop that took me 10 minutes to kill – if I had xKill, it would have been a matter of a couple of keystrokes to kill it.

It does take a small piece of RAM while sitting in the background, but it will pay off when you need it. Installing is trivial – you open the zip and run it when you want – it’s a stand-alone program. Once installed it places a small skull icon in your start tray:

 

 

Right click on it and you get these menu choices:

 

 

“About” tells you how it works:

 

 

Using it is pretty simple – this from the download site:

“Press Control+Alt+Backspace, and you will see a Skull and Crossbones follow behind your cursor. When you click on the next item (say, the frozen application), it will kill it. simple.

And just because I know that people will try this out with out having an app to kill, when the skull and crossbones is up, if you choose NOT to kill any thing, press Escape, and you will exit out of xKill mode.


No external references, this app is Portable, you will know when it is running due to the color changing Skull and Crossbones in your system tray. You can Right click on the glowing icon to either go in to xKill mode, so that you don’t have to do Control + Alt + Backspace, or you can exit out of xKill.”

If you’ve ever had an app that refused to close or hung-up and was difficult to terminate using Task Manager, xKill will solve the problem.

About Joe Citarella 242 Articles
Joe Citarella was one of the founders of Overclockers.com in 1998. He contributed as a site administrator and writer for over 10 years before retiring. Joe played an integral part in building and sustaining the Overclockers.com community.

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