Once you’re there, you can use the End Process, Open File Location, or Go to Service(s) options to control the process or stop it.Īlternatively you can even use resource monitor to stop any process that is running. Now you can simply open up Task Manager-you might have to use the option to Show Processes for All Users, and then you’ll be able to find the PID in the list. Find the one that’s bound to the port that you’re trying to troubleshoot-for this example, you’ll see that 0.0.0.0:80, or port 80, is in use by PID 1184. If you look on the right-hand side, you’ll see where I’ve highlighted the list of PIDs, or Process Identifiers.

You can also use this other method, which takes an extra step, but makes it easier to locate the actual process: You’ll see the process name in the list, and you can search for it. This will immediately show you a list, although it’s maybe a little complicated. Open up a command prompt and type in the following-you may have to open in Administrator mode to see all processes: Then we can use that number to look up exactly which process it is. The first step is to use a command-line tool to see what ports are in use, and use a special flag that tells us which port is assigned to each Windows process identifier number. Using Built-In Tools to See What is Listening on a Port There’s a number of ways to tell which application has the port locked, here we will use a windows built-in way using the command line and Task Manager. So if you need to use an in-use port, how do you tell what application is holding it?

Whenever an application wants to make itself accessible over the network, it claims a TCP/IP port, which means that port can’t be used by anything else.

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