Take Control of Your System

First a personal piece of information: my MVP status has been renewed! Wooohooo! I'm happy :-)

Now for the real stuff; the other day I was trying to uninstall WDS (Windows Desktop Search) and since I did not find the uninstaller in 'Add or Remove Programs' I had to do it manually. I found an entry on the net that explains in detail how to remove WDS and it involved removing the installation folder in the 'Program Files' directory.

When I tried to delete the folder, I could not because it was 'locked'. A quick search online turned up this utility that enables you to unlock ANY folder and subsequently delete it. Lovely tool indeed. It will also give you a list of all locking threads and you can decide which to kill / remove.

On other news, remember a company called Sysinternals? Well, Microsoft acquired the company back in 2006. (You will be redirected to a Microsoft Technet site.) Sysinternals had some extremely wonderful tools that enabled you to monitor literally everything on your computer. You can monitor the entries to your registry (RegMon) in real time! You can monitor your hard disk activity (FileMon). You can monitor the processes running on you computer (Process Explorer); it even shows .Net assemblies and other JIT (just in time) information.

The one I liked most, was Autoruns which allows you to view and switch on or off all the applications that start with Windows. Please note that RegMon and FileMon have been replaced by Process Explorer which, apparently, will do the same job.

Check it out!!

Links:
http://ccollomb.free.fr/unlocker
http://www.sysinternals.com
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/ProcessesAndThreads/Regmon.mspx
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/ProcessesAndThreads/Filemon.mspx
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/ProcessesAndThreads/ProcessExplorer.mspx
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/ProcessesAndThreads/Autoruns.mspx