How to delete "undeleteable" files

Ever try to trash a file on your Windows computer, only to get a message from the OS that "the file is in use" or "the file is locked" or some other excuse why it can't be removed from your hard drive?

You can try Safe Mode, process killing, and other time-consuming tricks to try to delete the thing, but these tactics take considerable knowhow. And whether they actually work is far from guaranteed.

This is a perennial issue in Windows, but it became a personal grudge match for me yesterday. Cleaning up a hard drive this weekend, I found two ancient, complete backups of that same hard drive tucked away inside a folder on the machine. (Both folders had been created by Gateway's system recovery software when I'd reformatted the computer in the past.)

That was convenient at the time, but the backups are useless to me now, and for some reason Windows had the folders locked. Since we're talking about two folders each with about 40GB of material in them, that's significant. And with hundreds of thousands of files in each one, scouring through the folders to find which file or files were "locked" just wasn't going to happen.

Unlocker to the rescue! Unlocker is a dead-simple application that can delete anything, locked or no.

The easiest way to use it is, after installing the app, simply right-click on the file or folder in Windows Explorer that you want to be rid of and select the "Unlocker" option that appears. Unlocker will check out the file and either unlock it or (as in my case) inaccurately claim there's no lock on the file.

Don't fret: Just select "Delete" from the drop-down box and let Unlocker do it's thing.

In some cases, this will take several minutes as it cranks through a large number of files. A reboot may be required (an alert will tell you if that's the case) for some files when Unlocker discovers they really are locked, but after your system comes back up. And that's it!

Unlocker is a very small and unobtrusive app, always there when you need it. My only annoyance: It puts an eBay icon on your desktop and quick launch bar, but that's a small price to pay since, otherwise, the app is totally free. 

Unlocker not working for you? Try one of these other free utilities to delete the undeleteable.