How to Find and Delete a File in Windows XP or Vista

How to find and delete a file in Windows XP or Vista is submitted here to help people completely uninstall a program. Please ignore it if you have already known about this.

 1. Click Start and then click Search.

 2. On “What do you want to search for” column on left, click on “All files and folders

3. Type the name of the undeletable file names on the search box, and choose the “Local Hard Drives” (normally, it’s C: drive)

4. Click “Search“.

5. Once the file is located, right-click on it and choose properties, make a note of the filelocation. Usually this is something similar to

 c:windowssystem32undeleteablefilesname.exe

 6. Close the search box

 7. Click on Start and then click Run.

 8. Type CMD and Press Enter to open a Command Prompt window.

 9. Press Ctrl+Shift+Esc to start Task Manager and then click on the process named Explorer.exe and click on End Process.

 10. Minimize Task Manager but leave it open.

 12. Go back to the Command Prompt window and change to the directory where the file is located. To do this, use the CD command. You can as the following example.

 Example: to change to the WindowsSystem32 directory you would enter the following command and Press Enter

 cd windowssystem32

 13. Now use the DEL command to delete the offending file. Type DEL <filename> where <filename> is the file you wish to delete.

 Example: del undeletable.exe

 14. Hold down Alt+Tab to go back to Task Manager

 15. In Task Manager, click File, New Task and enter EXPLORER.EXE to restart the Windows shell.

 16. Close Task Manager.

 Find and delete a file in Windows XP or Vista, and then go back to rest of uninstall instructions.