Windows 7: Services

At any point in time, there are multiple services running on your computer. These services control the inner workings and operations of your computer. With Windows 7, you can stop, start, configure and remove the services on your computer.

Services are system programs that run on your computer without a user interface. Services provide core operating system features, such as Web serving, event logging, file serving, printing, cryptography, and error reporting.

You can use the Services Microsoft Management Console (MMC) snap-in to manage services that are running on local or remote computers — for example, to stop or start a service. You can also manage services using the “sc config” command.

The following are actions that you can perform for services on local and remote computers (the remote computers must be running Microsoft Start, stop, pause, resume, or disable services):

Using the services console you can set up recovery actions to take place if a service fails — for example, restarting the service automatically or restarting the computer, run services in the security context of a user account that is different from the logged-on user or the default computer account.

You can also enable or disable services for a particular hardware profile, export and save service information to a .txt or .csv file, view the status and description of each service, and view the service dependencies.