--- title: "A short update and a cool process killing trick" url: "https://osherove.com/blog/2004/8/21/a-short-update-and-a-cool-process-killing-trick.md" canonical: "https://osherove.com/blog/2004/8/21/a-short-update-and-a-cool-process-killing-trick.html" published: "2004-08-21T12:27:00" updated: "2004-08-21T12:27:00" tags: ["Off Topic"] author: "Roy Osherove" description: "Yes. I am still alive. Meanwhile some things have taken place: 1. I celebrated my 29th birthday. Yey! 2. For my birthday - we got a ThinkPad T41p with 2GB RAM. that should be enough to run those longhorn demos in the…" usage: "Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page)." license: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" --- # A short update and a cool process killing trick By Roy Osherove August 21, 2004 In [Off Topic](https://osherove.com/blog/category/off-topic) **Historical article** · Originally published August 21, 2004; technical details may be outdated. Yes. I am still alive. Meanwhile some things have taken place: 1\. I celebrated my 29th birthday. Yey! 2\. For my birthday - we got a ThinkPad T41p with 2GB RAM. that should be enough to run those longhorn demos in the coming future, I hope :) 3\. I've been to a most amazing debugging lecture over at the visual C# users group. Some pretty amazing stuff in there. I should write about that some other time. meanwhile I learned a cool trick: **How to kill a process that wouldn't die through the TaskList dialog** 1\. Locate the process ID (make the "PID" column visible in the task list 2\. open a command prompt 3\. type "ntsd -p \[PID\]" without the quotes 4\. You've just entered a low level debugger and you'll notice that you are now inside a breakpoint on that process that wouldn't die. 5\. type "q" and ENTER to quit the debugger and the process will **die along with it**. 6\. this works for services too. I know I've been away and I can't promise that I'm back in full throttle, but I'll try to keep up with the blog until I can find more time. I'm not happy about not being able to invest time in something that has b\\done me so good so I'm in the process of finding ways to make more time available either through work or some other ways. It will **not** be on family time however. I've also been getting a little out of touch with the community (blogger dinners, TDD workshops etc..). I promise to get back to that ASAP. I'll get that working ## More in Off Topic [All posts in Off Topic](https://osherove.com/blog/category/off-topic) - Aug 24, 2004 ### [Gmail Notifier - by Google, finally](https://osherove.com/blog/2004/8/24/gmail-notifier-by-google-finally.html) - Aug 23, 2004 ### [Stuff to do](https://osherove.com/blog/2004/8/23/stuff-to-do.html) - Aug 7, 2004 ### [Absolute Powerpoint](https://osherove.com/blog/2004/8/7/absolute-powerpoint.html) - Aug 5, 2004 ### [MSN Web Messenger - cool piece of work](https://osherove.com/blog/2004/8/5/msn-web-messenger-cool-piece-of-work.html) --- ## About the author **Roy Osherove**: Senior Solutions Architect at AWS working on AI for production and AI-driven development; author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership, with about 20 years of consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery. ### Sites - [RobotPaper](https://robotpaper.ai/): This blog: AI patterns and anti-patterns, AI and coding agents, and engineering leadership. - [osherove.com](https://osherove.com): Roy's personal site. Author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership; consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery, plus about 20 years of blog posts. - [The Art of Unit Testing](https://www.artofunittesting.com): The Art of Unit Testing, 3rd Edition (Manning): readable, maintainable, trustworthy unit tests, plus TDD workshops in C#, JavaScript, Java and Kotlin. - [5whys.com](https://www.5whys.com): Roy's writing on software team leadership: self-organizing teams, surviving chaos, learning mode and the Elastic Leadership model. - [Pipeline Driven](https://pipelinedriven.org): Continuous delivery and DevOps practices: build patterns, pipeline-friendly testing, DevOps metrics and enterprise DevOps. - [Elastic Leadership](https://www.elasticleadership.com): Elastic Leadership, Roy's framework for software team leaders (survival, learning and self-organizing modes). ### Social - X: https://x.com/royosherove - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/osherove/ ### Contact - Contact form: https://forms.gle/jQSx5KoXvrVA1JCK7 ### License Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page). License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/