Finding the Process that has a Lock on a File when you don’t have Administrator

Most of the time Microsoft Windows experts will immediately point you to Sysinternals Process Explorer. Unfortunately for a vast majority of us, this requires Administrator privileges on your machine and in today’s security conscious society, System Admin give this out less and less.

Enter this solution I found from Stack Overflow user Svish.

The following is a direct copy paste of the post that you can find at this link for citation purposes.

You can use the Resource Monitor for this which comes built-in with Windows 7, 8, and 10.

1. Open Resource Monitor, which can be found
   • By searching for Resource Monitor or resmon.exe in the start menu, or
   • As a button on the Performance tab in your Task Manager
2. Go to the CPU tab
3. Use the search field in the Associated Handles section
   • See blue arrow in screen shot below

When you’ve found the handle, you can identify the process by looking at the Image and/or PID column.

You can then try to close the application as you normally would, or, if that’s not possible, just right-click the handle and kill the process directly from there. Easy peasy!