I have windows 8 - and I don't completely hate it. I dislike a lot of it, and not just because of change - but because of the inevitable lack of practicality that will come when something was designed for tablets and then badly ported to a workstation situation. You could say I hate the fact Microsoft seems to have gone "eh, stuff the traditional PC user - it's a new era".

No, the one problem that sticks in my craw, is the fact that they took "End Process" away from the context menu (right click) when selecting running applications in the task manager. This was the #1 thing I did in the Task Manager as a technical user, #2 being Run - Explorer.exe.

End task - ends an application when the application responds... This can take ages, meanwhile using up valuable system resources in the process (aka the computer runs like a dog while waiting for the application to close.)

End process - ends the application. No questions asked. Bam! done.

Now, why in the name of heaven and **** combined would you remove the only useful feature in the damn task manager? Why?!

Now the only way I can end hanging programs is by opening the command prompt and task killing PID's. If the program you want to end is causing the computer to hang, opening CMD sometimes isn't an option anyway!

Does anyone know any tricks, or third party apps (oh the irony) that will work better than the 'new and improved' task manager? Ideally, a tweak that brings the End Process option back to the existing Task Manager UI.

Extend the task manager and go to the Details tab. You can even right-click a process in the Processes tab and choose "go to details" to highlight it and kill the process.

This wasn't removed, the tab was renamed.