Choosing Which Task To Kill

Question: How do I figure out which engine is which, in Windows Task Manager?

When I have a [cough] problem and I need to kill one of several database engines running on the same computer, it's a crap shoot trying to tell them apart... whichever one I pick always turns out to be the wrong one.

Answer: It's pretty hard to do in Windows Ancient, where "pretty hard" is code for "I don't know".

But in Windows Recent, you can tell Task Manager to show the command line that launched the engine, and in a lot of cases that's enough to tell one process from another. Just use

Task Manager 
  - Processes tab 
     - View 
        - Select Columns... 

and check "Command Line" to turn this...

into this...

You can also use

Task Manager  
  - Performance tab  
     - Resource Monitor...
        - Disk tab  
           - Disk Activity pane 

to search through the "File" values to find the server PID (process identifier) associated with a particular database file name:

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