Windows Vista: Managing Services (Part 2)

In the first part of this article I explained how to access the services installed on your system. Now I am going to discuss how to manage them.

From the Services management console you can start, stop, restart, or disable the different services on your system. When you start or stop a service, that is very obvious what it does. Although when you stop a service, it's only stopped until you reboot your computer.

When you restart a service, it stops and starts it again. When you disable a service, that prevents the service from restarting next time you reboot your computer.

You also need to be aware that some services can have dependencies, and if you stop one it can have a cascade effect and stop other related services. For example, if you opened the 'DHCP Client' service, and clicked on the Dependencies tab you would see the other services that rely on it.

Below is a brief explanation of the different tabs in the Service dialog box:

• General: Displays the state of the service, and where the related executables are located.
• Log On: Allows you to manage the which account the service uses to run.
• Recovery: Allows you manage how a service will try to recover itself if it fails.
• Dependencies: Shows you which other services dependencies on that service.