EMCO UnLock IT 6.1.1

Overview

Sometimes due to bugs or even plain unawareness users have difficulties renaming, moving or deleting files and folders because they are being used by running processes. EMCO Unlock IT can find which process uses the locked file/folder and you can close it yourself in order to perform the desired action afterwards. If you can’t do so, you can command the program to release the file from its process; if that doesn't work, Unlock IT will terminate the process as a last resort.

Installation

It’s a piece of cake to install this software. There are no advanced settings throughout the whole process, plus it finishes in only a few steps. The setup package is clean from any types of malware and doesn’t include any additional software either.

Unlock IT works well under all versions of Windows from 2000 and afterwards, without any special requirements.

Interface

The interface of the program is quite intuitive and modern, with icons for every button in the toolbar and icons for the menu bar items as well. There are many skins you can choose from, such as Office 2010 (Blue, Silver, Black), Office 2007 (Blue, Silver, Black, Pink, Green), Black, Silver, Lilian, Caramel and others.

In the center part of the window is a field from where you browse for the file you want to unlock, and below is an area where details about the process that uses it are shown.

Pros

There are three ways to open a file or folder in Unlock IT: via drag & drop, by browsing for the item using the respective option in the program, and by using the context menu option. By default the last choice is disabled so if you want to open a file or folder directly you have to enable it yourself by checking the bottom left box that says “Integrate into Windows Explorer”.

The software displays several details regarding the process that has locked the item you picked; these include process name, process ID, description and executable path. If you right-click on the process you can see a few options, one of them being “Properties”. This feature brings up a window with a lot more information about the process itself, such as total processor time, start time and process modules.

The other options in the right-click menu give you the power to close Library and/or File handles to release the file, kill the process or jump to the executable’s path directory.

If for some reason you aren’t sure whether an item is locked by a process or not, just open it in Unlock IT and use the “Check” function. If it’s not locked, a message will pop-up and tell you that it’s unlocked, otherwise the process that uses it will be displayed.

Cons

The program sometimes has problems unlocking files from applications. For example, when trying to release a PDF file from Foxit Reader, Unlock IT stated that the file was released; however, it only caused Foxit Reader to start popping-up blank error messages until the system’s memory is full (Tip: in this case, open start manager and kill the process ASAP). This is quite an important issue. In addition, there are no move/rename/delete functions implemented.

Alternatives

Here’s a list with some programs with the same purpose: Unlocker (free), LockHunter (free), FileASSASSIN (free; allows only deletion of locked files), Lock-UnMatic (Mac, free) and Who Lock Me (free). The best one of those is Unlocker, which has relatively many features, is stable and does a good job overall.

Conclusion

While it has a nice user interface and is easy to use, it does have a couple of disadvantages that cannot be overlooked. Hopefully those will be fixed in future releases.