TBF the task manager and those windows explorer dialogues were programed in like 1996 and it’s probably one of the best functioning feature in Windows so changing it too much carries high risks.
Lol yea, but it would have been such a small tweak with big big QoL improvements LMAO
You can use process explorer, it even has option to act as a replacement for task manager.
Edit: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/process-explorer
back in the XP days, I used a software called “Unlocker” just for this problem. It probably still exists, I don’t know, because since Windows 7, the easiest way to find out what process locks a file is to open Resource Monitor (Start search: resmon) and on the CPU tab, using the “Associated handles” list, you can search for the file name and see the process in question (and kill it).
So yeah, Resource Monitor is a useful tool on Windows.
What gets me is when I’m not allowed to remove an external drive. Deleting a file can be delayed until later but here I am with a physical object that I need to detach from my computer and first I need to play hide and seek with the OS.
If this happens often, you can disable write caching for that drive. It’ll feel slightly slower (since it’s actually operating at the speed of the hardware instead of caching operations in RAM and gradually writing them to disk in the background), but you’ll be able to remove the drive almost instantly.
I used to find it had something to do with the explorer thumbnailer finishing up but sort of not letting go. It would happen if I had pictures or videos on the USB drive, and if I got the error I could go to another folder like my documents, drag a picture into another folder, go look at the pretty new thumbnail, then I could remove the USB drive because the thumbnailer was ‘parked’ back on the C drive. Sounds like I’m making it up but I swear it worked.
Shouldn’t that happen automatically if the drive is identified as removable? And the real solution should be to tell the OS that it’s removable?
I was having terrible performance problems in Windows a while back, and it turned out it had marked every drive as removable and the write cache was filling up due to an extremely slow external HDD, causing even the internal SSDs to grind to a halt until the buffer was flushed whenever a large amounts of writes were made to the HDD. Which, since the external drive was used for backups and large Steam games, was almost every other day.
You can use this performance view thing that comes with windows to search for file handles and the processes that own them
Meanwhile on Linux: /boot successfully deleted
Actually on windows 7 I found out how to get which process is locking one file.
You open the resources manager (task manager has a link to it)
Inside you can see how much each process uses on cpu, network and stuff.
And there is a tab where all used files for each process is listed. You can search for specific files.
Yeah there’s a Microsoft sysinternals utility where you can drag a file into to fetch that info for you.
Makes zero sense there isn’t a >Details in the error notification that tells you the damned process in Windows.
Not only that, but you can actually search all active processes to see which handles they keep references to. Just search the name of your file and it will show you the processes which use it
Gawd forbid users get some transparency.
Right? I get that it’s “alarming” to users to see weird stuff, but just hide it under a little expandable thing.
It’s one of the things that made me prefer using Linux a long long time ago. It’s nice to be able to rename, move, and delete files while they are used.
Linux fuser for the win
Or stay with the basics and use lsof.
Either way, not coming with that tool by default and forcing every usage of the file to lock it is a really stupid pair of mistakes.
Reason 3756 why Windows is slopware
On macos, that program is sometimes just Finder trying to calculate folder size
“Hey Microsoft, i want to safely remove this hard drive so i don’t corrupt my data”
“Nope, it’s being used by another program”
“I shut down every program, nothing is open, please eject my Hard drive”
“Nope, It’s being used by another program”
**Proceed to just yank the cord out of the computer and flick off the screen.
Same on Mac except it’s an external drive that some mystery program is using.
same with my kobo. It VERY rarely ejects it. It will just say “unable to eject. force eject?”
Process explorer, threads and handles tool, search the file name.
Kill the process or at least you know who now.
“Hey can I rent this apartment?”
“Let me check… Seems like it’s already occupied”
“Omg who is occupying it?”
“Let me print out their name and contact details for you”
your printer works?!
Touché
Bad analogy.
This would be more like the property management having a record of what apartments are rented, and having a second list of who is renting apartments (but not which one), and the landlord wanting to know who is renting apartment 420 so they can draw up eviction papers.
The user probably wasn’t running as admin (elevated) while deleting the file, so as far as the system knows, he may not be allowed to know which process is accessing the file.
omg
