Tag: process explorer

How to Find Zombie Processes that Are Eating Your Memory in Windows

Luke Johnson

When working with serious hardware and big 3D models, computer memory management is an important thing. You want every byte of RAM to be doing a job for your system. So I was very interested to read this detailed write-up by randomascii where he describes ‘zombie handles’ that can hold or consume memory on your system. His post is very detailed, but I will go ahead and over-simplify it for you:

  1. Download findzombiehandles_prebuilt package from here (or clone the github here)
  2. Unzip it and open an elevated Command Window at that location
  3. Run FindZombieHandles

You should get a list of zombie processes and the parent executable that initiated them.

From here you could investigate further with Process Explorer or attempt to kill them with Task Manager or taskkill.

Process Explorer Download and How to Find Out What is Locking Your Files

Luke Johnson

Process Explorer is a free and very powerful task manager that let’s you really see what is going on with your system… One of those things every IT person should have in their toolkit. You can get it here:

 Download Process Explorer (1.8 MB)

from this page

and here’s how to find out which process or program is locking a file or directory in Windows:

Go to Find > Find Handle or DLL. In the “Handle or DLL substring:” text box, type the path to the file (e.g. “C:\path\to\file.txt”) and click “Search”. All processes which have an open handle to that file should be listed.