How to safely force Windows to eject a USB drive

Sometimes Windows will not eject a USB drive (Your drive is currently in use) even when you're sure you closed all the applications that could possibly access to it.

There are several solutions for this, such as logging out and manually remove the USB drive.

Sometimes you don't want to do that because you would lose important data, such as bank transactions or any live activity.

If so, there's a quick fix for this situation.

If you can't figure out what specific program is locking the drive, you can simply kill Windows Explorer and manually remove your drive.

You only have to open Task Manager (CTRL/ALT/DEL) and look for Windows Explorer in the active processes or, for Windows 7, for explorer.exe.

In Windows 8 you can click Restart, while in Windows 7 you'll have to kill the process and then start it manually by clicking File/New task and enter explorer.exe.

In both cases, when the task bar disappears, you can safely remove your drive because no program is writing to disk.

This way you can solve the problem without risking to lose your data.