Managing Services

Windows provides four main tools for managing services:

• The Services snap-in (Services.msc)
• Task Manager
• Group Policy
• The Sc.exe command

Managing Services Using the Services Snap-in

The Services snap-in in Windows 7 is the same as in Windows Vista. Compared to this snap-in in Windows XP, the main difference is that the Startup value for a service can be configured as Automatic (Delayed Start) on the General tab of the properties sheet for the service.

Important Before configuring a service for Delayed Start, be sure that you understand the possible ramifications. Delayed Start does not provide any time guarantee for when a delayed service will start after the boot process finishes, and if a client application attempts to use the service before it starts, the client application may fail. This means that client applications should be designed to start up the service on demand if they need the service before the Delayed Start sequence starts it. In addition, if a particular service is configured for Delayed Start and SCM detects other services that depend on this service, SCM will ignore the Delayed Start setting on the service and will start it during the boot process.

The only other change from Windows XP is the option of enabling actions for stops with errors. This option can be configured on the Recovery tab, and configuring it enables detection of and recovery from nonfatal errors.