How in the Tech

Removing third party system services from Windows

By Adam Myers ⋅ October 19, 2009 ⋅ Tags: Command Prompt, Windows

Windows System Services are background processes in Windows that are either vital for running certain applications or Windows itself. Typically they require no user interaction to perform their role and as such, they are usually configured to start automatically upon system boot. If you’ve ever looked in Task Manager for the list of running processes, Windows System Services are identified by the name svchost.exe and owned by the user SYSTEM. By and large, most of the system services are provided directly from Microsoft but other vendors are just as likely to introduce their own. If you have any anti-virus software installed, that manufacturer likely has a few background processes registered to execute on your system in the background, without your interaction, for example.

In a perfect world, when software is uninstalled properly by the user all remnants are eradicated from the system. Veteran users of Windows know that this is rarely the case. There can be cases where the vendor uninstall routine fails on you, leaving your system in a quasi-clean state. It happens more than you can imagine and is one of the reasons Windows begins to stumble after using the same install for a long time. In these situations, you may find yourself with system services that are of no use. Launching the Services control panel – Win+R and then services.msc – will display all the services registered to the system. However, this interface does not provide any way to actually de-register or delete the process entry. To do that requires a bit of Command Prompt magic.

1. Open an Administrator Command Prompt with Start->Run->cmd or typing cmd in the Vista/Win 7 search box, right-clicking on the result and choosing Run as administrator.
2. In the resulting black Command Prompt window the command to delete a system service is: sc delete <service name>
3. The service name can be determined from the services.msc application above. Located the desired service and double click on it to open up it’s Properties. Look for the line labeled Server name. Here you can see I want to remove the service name McTaskManager.



4. The full command for step 2 would then be sc delete McTaskManager. That’s really all there is to it!