Chrome has (what’s supposed to be) a nifty feature under the hood: each tab runs as its own Windows process. This means – in theory – that if one tab were to crash, it won’t take down the rest of your open tabs. You should – in theory – be able to close the misbehaving tab and go on about your business.
But what happens when Chrome itself stops responding? You could try using the “X” (close) button in the upper right corner of the Chrome window, or you could try CTRL+SHIFT+Q to exit Chrome. But what if Chrome doesn’t respond to mouse clicks or keyboard sequences? You could always open Task Manager and kill the Chrome processes… but remember, each tab is its own process. If you have 30+ tabs open, your Task Manager will probably look like this:
Do you HAVE to right-click on each process and choose “End Process”?
Of course not… if you’re using Windows XP or later. Just open a command prompt and type the following:
TASKKILL /IM chrome.exe /F
Taskkill, which is built in to Windows, does exactly what it says on the tin: kills any process you want. The /IM switch tells Taskkill to use “image name” (or process name) instead of the numerical “process ID”. The /F switch tells Taskkill to kill all instances of the image name. By the way, Taskkill works on any Windows process, not just Chrome. You can use it to kill all instances of IEXPLORE.EXE or FIREFOX.EXE or WINWORD.EXE… or anything else you need killed. Just change “chrome.exe” to whatever process you want.
