Kill a process using image name:

We can kill all the processes running a specific executable using the below command.

taskkill /IM executablename

Example:
Kill all processes running mspaint.exe:

c:\>taskkill /IM mspaint.exe
SUCCESS: Sent termination signal to the process "mspaint.exe" with PID 1972.

Kill a process forcibly

In some cases, we need to forcibly kill applications. For example, if we try to to kill Internet explorer with multiple tabs open, tasklist command would ask the user for confirmation. We would need to add /F flag to kill IE without asking for any user confirmation.

taskkill /F /IM iexplore.exe

F : to forcibly kill the process. If not used, in the above case it will prompt the user if the opened pages in tabs need to be saved.

To kill Windows explorer, the following command would work

C:\>taskkill /F /IM explorer.exe
SUCCESS: The process "explorer.exe" with PID 2432 has been terminated.

The above command would make all GUI windows disappear. You can restart explorer by running ‘explorer’ from cmd.

C:\>explorer

Not using /F option, would send a terminate signal. In Windows 7, this throws up a shutdown dialog to the user.

C:\>taskkill /IM explorer.exe
SUCCESS: Sent termination signal to the process "explorer.exe" with PID 2432.
C:\>

Kill a process with process id:

We can use below command to kill a process using process id(pid).

taskkill /PID  processId

Example:
Kill a process with pid 1234.

taskkill /PID 1234

Kill processes consuming high amount of memory

taskkill /FI "memusage gt value"