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Deleting Files
(lemmy.nz)
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this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2025
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In case anyone is interested, there's a powertoy called file locksmith that will show what's using it and let you kill it: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/file-locksmith
"Time to see who's stopping me from deleting this file... svchost??? Goddamn it!"
just kill it
Instructions unclear, I shot my gaming rig with a 6 bore shotgun…. And then set it on fire.
Instructions may have been unclear, but you got the gist of it.
Hole-y and on fire:
"This program is preventing Windows from shutting down:"
He's a little confused, but he's got the spirit.
I used to, all the time
This was in the XP days so I didn't know how to figure out which service it was, I was a kid. But some svchost process would manifest as a task to switch to in the alt + tab switcher and made the computer slow and weird. I just killed it. No idea if it was a bug or a virus.
Probably the indexing service, it's always the indexing service.
Well, it could be an executable disguising itself as svchost. Pretty common for malware or video game cheats to name their executables svchost.exe to hide from anti-virus/anticheat
I'm in this picture and I don't like it. I was trying to diagnose a prod server crashing this very Wednesday and seeing the lines of svchost.exe is so fucking maddening... I'm glad ProcessExplorer was there to give some useful fucking info, at least.
Powertoys seems to be the only thing keeping windows somewhat usable, I have no idea why they don't include it in the build.
I discovered powertoys only recently, and it's a pretty cool set of tools. From color picker, tiling window manager to regex file renames or copy/paste tools, it has a lot of QoL features.
If you have to be on windows, i.e due ro work, I recommend not sleeping on it.
The performance view thing that comes with windows also allows searching for file handles but it's not very user friendly. Also not possible without admin rights if I remember correctly
Why isn't this in their OS instead of unwanted AI
You can use the built-in tool resmon.exe to do the same
Now the question is if I can install it on my work computer without IT getting pissy
Sysinternals handle is lightweight unitasker for this too, better option for servers.