Ever seen this error message?
Or one of its other faces? Error messages like “Cannot delete file: Access is denied,” “The file is in use by another program or user,” or “The source or destination file may be in use.”
Because I’m so hard on computers and get impatient when Windows is doing things that, in my opinion, take too long, I see these errors at least once a day – usually several times.
On one of my computers with Norton SystemWorks undelete installed, the files in the Recycle Bin (which I’ve renamed “Trash”) weren’t going away when I emptied the Trash. When I tried to manually delete them, I got those nasty error messages. It was as if the files were thumbing their noses at me. “Nah! Nah! Nah! You tried to delete us but we’re not going away!”
Slowly but surely, gigabytes of deleted files were filling up my hard disk. I was sure it wasn’t a problem caused by SystemWorks, but didn’t have the time to figure out what was causing it. So it went on my (much-too-long) to do list.
For a long time I did nothing. Other things were always more important. Finally, “find a way to get rid of those deleted files” made it to the top of the list. In other words, I was running low enough on free disk space that I either had to get rid of the files or stop using the computer.
And that’s when I ran across “Unlocker“, a free program written by Cedrick Collomb who, according to his LinkedIn profile, is Director of Engineering at LucasArts.
It’s a very small program. It uses hardly any of your computer resources and takes only a minute or two to set up. After installation, anytime your computer starts complaining, a window pops up to help you fix the problem – whatever it is. (Of course, it only takes care of the immediate problem. Whatever caused the problem is still there, waiting to bother you again in the future…)
Clicking on the “Kill Process” button and Excel disappears; it is no longer running on your computer. Or you can “unlock” the file and work with it manually. You can also use the dropdown list to delete the file, rename, move it or copy it to another folder. If something has happened that involves several programs, all of them will be in the list and you can unlock them all with a single click.
The Unlocker “assistant” starts when you boot up your computer and puts a small icon in the tray at the bottom of your screen.
If you’d like to use the program directly, Unlocker has been added to the list of things you can do when you right click on a file or folder in Explorer.
Click on “Unlocker” and the program starts up with the document(s) or folder(s) you right clicked on. Even if a file isn’t locked by Windows, you’ll still have the option to force a delete, rename it or move it.
This is how I finally got rid of all those “deleted” files that weren’t actually being deleted, that I couldn’t delete manually and that were quickly making me lose patience. While Unlocker went about its job of getting rid of those pesky files, I thumbed my nose at them as they quickly slipped into oblivion.
Thank you Cedrick Collomb for a fine utility! If you find it useful, donate to the cause.
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