Windows operating system provides services in order to complete tasks in the foreground. There may become different types of job services in order to accomplish tasks like printing, network authentication, encryption, etc. Windows provides a lot of services by default. But more services can be added by third-party applications or other tools. services.msc is a shortcut to the service management console. In this tutorial, we will look at how to open and manage services with services.msc.
Open Windows Services Manager
Services Manager is used to managing operating systems services. There are different ways to open the Services Manager.
By writing Services to the search we will be listed the Services Manager. This will work with Recent Windows Operating systems like Windows 8, Windows 10, Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2016.
More compatible way to open Service Manager is running services.msc command in the Run . This will work all windows versions like Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 8, Windows 10, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2016.
Show/Display Service Status
After opening the Services Manager panel we will see a lot of services that are in a different states. There is two basic services status type
- Running means services is running as expected
- Stopped means services is not running and active.
We can see from screenshot that Service like Application Information is running without a problem. but service BranchCache is stopped and not running.
Change Service Status with GUI
We can change the service status. We can start or stop a service with net command which is provided by the operating system. But as you expect we need Administrator privileges in order to start and stop the service. We can use GUI too in order to manage Windows services with related buttons like start, stop, resume, etc. after select relevant service from the list.
For command line we need open a Administrator pribileged MSDOS or Powershell. Just right click to the opened box and Run as administrator.
Show Windows Service Status In Command Line
We will use sc command which is the main tool used to manage windows service. We will use query parameter in order to list given service status. We will list service named Application Info which is named as Appinfo in windows services.
> sc query Appinfo
As we can see from screenshot it has type 30 which is a Win32 service.
Start Windows Service In Command Line
We will use sc command with start parameter and service name in order to start the service named Appinfo .
> sc start AppinfoStop Windows Service In Command Line
We can stop the service with stop parameter. But keep in mind that some services may take some time to stop. After stopped the related session state of the session will be lost.
> sc stop AppinfoPause windows Server In Command Line
Another state of windows service is pause state which is rarely used. We can pause service for a short time.
> sc pause AppinfoResume Windows Service In Command Line
We need also resume paused windows service. We can use resume paramter for this.
> sc resume AppinfoStart Service On Boot
Services are started after a reboot automatically if they are set enabled. If not and set to Manual start we need to start them manually. We can enable auto service to start after a reboot with config command like below.
> sc config "Appinfo" start=enabled