Manage Windows Services

Managing Windows services is a painless efforts because the Microsoft tool services.msc does a decent enough job. It provides an interface that is displaying all existing services, their status and enough options to change the status easily. But there is always room for improvement. System administrators for instance would love an option to save different service profiles or save profiles in an xml file to load them on different machines easily.

That is where Turbo Service Manager (via Download Squad) comes into play. The software program feels like a portable advanced version of services.msc. Like its official counterpart Turbo Service Manager displays all Windows services in its main window. The name, description, state and startup type are listed plus the dependencies which is the first major difference to the Microsoft tool.

Dependencies are other services that either depend on the selected service or services that are required to run before the selected service can be started. Father and child processes so to speak. It is possible to sort all services by every listed parameter.

Working with Turbo Services Manager is easier because it provides keyboard shortcuts for most possible actions. It is possible to start, stop, resume, uninstall and pause services with keyboard shortcuts. The same is true for changing the startup type of a service. One interesting feature is the option to select multiple services at once and apply an action to all of them at once. Something that is not possible when working with services.msc.

Turbo Service Manager can select all services that depend on or are required for the selected service to run. More interesting than that option is the ability to save and load a Windows services configuration. Test Load displays the changes that would have been made to the services configuration if the configuration would have been loaded.

TSM is a small portable application that runs fine on 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Windows XP and Windows Vista