Controlling Windows Services From the Windows Services Manager

A Windows Service is an executable program that runs in the background while your system is running, providing essential functions and automating routine tasks. Although many services work invisibly, you can use the Windows Services manager to control their operations and even start them manually. You can also find and switch off unnecessary services to improve system performance. The Windows Registry contains information about each service, including its name, display name, description and path to its executable file as well as its startup type, log on as account, status, dependencies and more.

You can use the Windows Registry editor to view and change these properties. The startup type tells the service how it is launched, which can be automatic at boot, automatically with a delay, manual, or disabled. The log on as account option enables you to specify whether the service runs using the local system account, a user account with administrator privileges or another account that you manually specify. The dependencies section lists other services that the service depends on, allowing you to ensure that required services are started in the correct order, helping prevent failures and improving overall system reliability.

If you need to start or stop a service, you can do so from the Windows Services manager by right-clicking (or pressing and holding) on it and selecting the appropriate command from the menu that appears. You can also right-click on a service and select the Properties command from the context menu. This opens a dialog box that shows the same information, as well as additional options to pause, resume or restart the selected service.

For example, if you have configured a service to run only when your computer is plugged into a power source, you can use the pause option to temporarily stop the service, so that it does not run at startup or continuously drains your battery. Once you connect the power source to your laptop again, the service resumes its normal operation.

In addition to the services built into Windows, you can create your own custom programs by creating a Windows Service application project in Visual Studio. The project must contain installation components that can be used to deploy the service on a computer.

Microsoft releases updates to the operating system through three servicing channels. You can use the Windows Update for Business, Windows Server Update Services or System Center Configuration Manager to deploy these updates. Each channel allows you to separate devices into deployment groups for feature and quality updates, which increases your flexibility when planning a device update strategy and decreases the amount of time that your users are without features and experiences. The General Availability channel receives feature updates at the same time as the rest of the world, and you can choose to deploy these to your devices immediately or with a delayed delivery. The Long-Term Servicing Channel, designed for specialized devices such as ATM machines or kiosk endpoints that don’t run Office, blocks feature updates but carries on with the original quality update schedule and can be updated through the LTSC update tool, available through WSUS or SCCM.

source https://innovativeglass.wordpress.com/2025/04/12/controlling-windows-services-from-the-windows-services-manager/