How To Open System Utilities In Windows 10

[Anita Damelio]

Inmy last post I discussed all of the unnecessary, auxiliary processes that may be running on your system. Items such as update utilities, that generally present themselves as Icons within your System Tray or Notification Area (near your clock in the Windows Taskbar). In an effort to stop the bleeding of system resources I would like to introduce you to the clotting agent: System Configuration (MSCONFIG).

As I mentioned in my last post: Shutting down processes can result in some programs or services on your machine not functioning as you expect. You may want to consult with your IT department before implementing any changes to your system.

As I mentioned in my earlier post, as I am likely shutting down programs that will assist me in keeping my software and utilities up to date, this will place the responsibility for ensuring that my system is up to date on my shoulders as the user. Generally I perform these updates on an as-needed basis.

This is mainly a warning to users who were not planning to shut off any processes or services in the case that something malicious has done this for them. The check-box within the warning dialog, will allow you to close the dialog and never see the warning during subsequent restarts.

One thing that annoys me no end about Windows is the old sharing violation error. Often you can't identify what's holding it open. Usually it's just an editor or explorer just pointing to a relevant directory but sometimes I've had to resort to rebooting my machine.

I've had success with Sysinternals Process Explorer. With this, you can search to find what process(es) have a file open, and you can use it to close the handle(s) if you want. Of course, it is safer to close the whole process. Exercise caution and judgement.

Just be very careful with closing handles; it's even more dangerous than you'd think, because of handle recycling - if you close the file handle, and the program opens something else, that original file handle you closed may be reused for that "something else." And now guess what happens if the program continues, thinking it is working on the file (whose handle you closed), when in fact that file handle is now pointing to something else.

Suppose a search index service has a file open for indexing but hasgotten stuck temporarily and you want to delete the file, so you(unwisely) force the handle closed. The search index service opens itslog file in order to record some information, and the handle to thedeleted file is recycled as the handle to the log file. The stuckoperation finally completes, and the search index service finally getsaround to closing that handle it had open, but it ends up unwittinglyclosing the log file handle.

The search index service opens anotherfile, say a configuration file for writing so it can update somepersistent state. The handle for the log file gets recycled as thehandle for the configuration file. The search index service wants tolog some information, so it writes to its log file. Unfortunately, thelog file handle was closed and the handle reused for its configurationfile. The logged information goes into the configuration file,corrupting it.

Meanwhile, another handle you forced closed was reusedas a mutex handle, which is used to help prevent data from beingcorrupted. When the original file handle is closed, the mutex handleis closed and the protections against data corruption are lost. Thelonger the service runs, the more corrupted its indexes become.Eventually, somebody notices the index is returning incorrect results.And when you try to restart the service, it fails because itsconfiguration files have been corrupted.

You report the problem to thecompany that makes the search index service and they determine thatthe index has been corrupted, the log file has mysteriously stoppedlogging, and the configuration file was overwritten with garbage. Somepoor technician is assigned the hopeless task of figuring out why theservice corrupts its indexes and configuration files, unaware that thesource of the corruption is that you forced a handle closed.

Just to clarify, this is more likely to be a result of misbehaving 3rd party apps not using the CreateFile API call correctly than it is to be anything in Windows itself. Perhaps it's a consequence of the design of CreateFile, but done is done and we can't go back.

Now, if Explorer seems to be the culprit here, it may be the case that that's just on the surface, and that the true culprit is something that installs a shell extension that opens all files in a folder for it's own purposes but is either too gung-ho in doing so, or that doesn't clean up properly after itself. Symantec AV is something I've seen doing this before, and I wouldn't be surprised if other AV programs were also to blame. Source control plug-ins may also be at fault.

So not really an answer, but just some advice to not always blame Windows for what may be a badly written 3rd party program (something that can also happen on any other OS which has implicit file locking, but any unix based OS has shared access by default).

Otherwise, kill the desktop Explorer process and do what you want while it's gone. First start a copy of cmd.exe (you need a UI to do your intended cleanup). Make sure there are no non-desktop Explorers running. Then kill the last Explorer with, e.g., Task Manager. Do what you want in the command prompt. Finally, run Explorer from the command prompt, and it will become the desktop.

The above upvoted answers cover situations where a program process is holding the file handle open, which (fortunately) is most of the time - however in some cases (as is occurring on this system at the moment), the system itself holds a file handle open.

You can identify this situation by following the instructions to find the file handle holding process with process explorer above, and noting that the process name is listed as 'system', or by following the the instructions using resource monitor and noting that no image is shown having a filehandle open on your file of interest (Although obviously something does as you can't edit/delete etc the file).

I got turned on to the Free Extended Task Manager a while ago by Jeremy Zawodny's blog, and it's great for tracking down further info on processes too. +1 for Process Explorer as above, too, especially for killing processes that the standard Task Manager won't end.

There is a tool FILEMON and shows open files and handles. Its hard to keep up with its display if you watch it live, it does so quickly. But you can stop it from displaying live and you can watch all file open/write activity. Now owned by Microsoft but originally by Sysinternals

Description: SystemRescue (formerly known as SystemRescueCd) is a Linuxsystem rescue toolkit available as a bootable medium for administrating orrepairing your system and data after a crash. It aims to provide an easy way tocarry out admin tasks on your computer, such as creating and editing the harddisk partitions. It comes with a lot of Linux system utilitiessuch as GParted, fsarchiver, filesystem tools and basic tools (editors, midnightcommander, network tools). It can be used for both Linuxand windowscomputers, and on desktops as well as servers. This rescue system requires noinstallation as it can be booted from a CD/DVD drive orUSB stick, but it can beinstalled on the hard diskif you wish. The kernel supports all important file systems (ext4, xfs, btrfs,vfat, ntfs), as well as network filesystems such as Samba and NFS.

It is possible to make custom versions of the system.For example, you can add your own scripts, make an automatic restoration of thesystem. It is also possible to create custom versions of SystemRescue.

It is very easy to install SystemRescue on a USB stick. That is very useful incase you cannot boot from the CD/DVD drive. You just have to copy several files tothe stick and run syslinux. The install process can be done from Linux orWindows. Follow instructions from the manual for more details.

Windows Utility programs come with the OS and can help you better control your system so it is optimized specifically for you. We will be covering how to use task manager, event viewer, performance monitor, system configuration utility, and the registry editor. Although other utilities like anti-virus, backup software, disk managers or memory testers can also be useful to you.

By using the utility programs that Windows 10 and 7 come with you can take better care of your computer, improve its performance, customize it to suit your needs best, and monitor what is taking place on your computer.

One utility that you may already be somewhat familiar with is task manager. Possibly in the past, you've had an application or program that crashes and you use task manager to close it. But there is a lot more that task manager has to offer. It can be opened easiest by pressing ctrl shift esc.

By going through the processes list you can see if there is anything that is unknown to you. If something looks out of place you may want to check the publisher. Then you can search online for the process name. Sometimes you can find malware on your system just by looking at what's running.

Another utility that comes built in with windows is Event Viewer. Access it simply by searching for event viewer from the start menu. Event viewer contains a lot of logs from your computer and the average user has probably never used it.

This will show you a lot of warnings and errors, and it's common to have a lot. Having a lot of errors isn't necessarily bad, but if you notice a lot coming from one thing it may make you want to go check on it.

There are many different counters you can track with the performance monitor. And If there are any counters that you find yourself going to check on regularly you may want to set up a Data Collection set. You can use this to schedule times to monitor and then check on them later.

The regedit utility is used to edit your Windows registry. The first thing you want to do is to first backup the registry before making any changes. There's a lot of values you can change, but often it seems like more harm can be done through the registry editor than good. An example of something to change is "WaitToKillServiceTimeout" if you want things to close quicker.

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