How to find what process is using which port in Windows 7

Here’s a quick tutorial on how to find the process that is currently using a specific port such as that of http which is port 80. This is useful if you’re trying to install a service that used a standard port but won’t be able to bind to it because it’s already been used by another running application.

In this tutorial we will be using port 80, the scenario is we want to run a web server through xammp in our local computer running windows 7 but the http service wouldn’t start because another program is using port 80, now we need to find out what program is the culprit and terminate it.

Error:
Port already in used, bind to port failed!

Fix:

netstat

Doing netstat -aon | findstr 0.0.0.0:80 and netstat -aon | findstr 0.0.0.0:443 results to the above output. Take note of the PID column as we are going to need that number to match to the running processes.

Now, open the Task Manager and click on processes tab. Click on View and Select columns and check the PID (Process identifier) box and click Ok.

pid column

Take note below of the PID column, look for the Process ID of the listening port, In this case, it’s the Skype process that caused the http service not able to start. Click on the process and click End Task to terminate it.

skype pid