Sometimes things go bad. You try to uninstall a software program that you do not longer need or recover a computer system after a hard drive crash only to find out that some traces of old programs are still in the system. One of these places is Services in the Windows operating system. What are the possibilities if a service is listed there that belongs to a software program that is no longer installed on the computer system? The Services control panel itself is not offering any means to delete services.
Administrators can remove services from Windows operating systems using the following means:
1. Command Line
The basic command to delete a service is sc delete followed by the short name of the service. The short name is not the name that is shown in the Services main menu. Administrators need to right-click the service, select properties and use the ServiceName in the general tab instead.
The command to remove the PC Tools Auxiliary Service would be therefor sc delete sdAuxService.
Windows 7 and Windows Vista users need to run the command from an elevated command prompt.
2. Software
Autoruns by Sysinternals can be used to remove most third party services from the Windows operating system. It does however not necessarily list all services. Users need to fallback to the manual service removal procedure if that is the case. Switching to the Services tab in the application will list the services that are recognized by Autoruns.
Selecting a service in that list and pressing delete will remove it from the Services menu.
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There ia an alternative for that… Whn you see a program running in your Task manager and you realize it’s from one of the services, you can go to Start/Run, then regedit
Under hkey_local_machine/system/currentcontrolset/services you can do a search for this executable and from that you can also get a service name (the name of the folder in registry editor).
Then you can go on with a command line removal procedure.
This is useful when you only know the name of the application that is running (filename that is) and you don’t know to which service it belongs.
Brilliant post! thanks Martin
Thanks for the post, was really helpful