Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Freeware
Better Windows Service Control With Turbo Services Manager
by Lee Mathews Sep 26th 2008
For the past few days I've been using Turbo Services Manager as an alternative. It's a 123k (311k for the 64-bit version) portable application that performs all of the msc's functions and more.
I'm particularly enjoying the hotkeys, which make stopping, starting, and restarting a lot less cumbersome. I've always hated having to click into a service's propteris screen just to stop it. Highlight a row in TSM and press shift + s to put the brakes on. The main display shows the name, state, dependencies, startup type, and description of your Windows services.
You can even uninstall a service, something that I find extremely useful on the poor, old Pentium 3 rigs that someone's buddy pushed and prodded through a full XP install.
There's even an option to do a "test load," which simulates what would've happened if you actually applied the changes you made. TSM also lets you save states to an XML file, which is a painless way to apply service settings on multiple machines. Nice!
Turbo Services Manager is freeware, and runs on 32 or 64-bit Windows only.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Jash Sayani said 1:03PM on 9-26-2008
Great Tool ! Thanks. I'll add it to be Portable Apps collection.
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Jeremy said 3:30PM on 9-26-2008
Definitely worth a look - where might you suggest a good list of service tweaks - or perhaps you would be willing to share your own?
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Lee Mathews said 2:03PM on 9-26-2008
Absolutely, Jeremy! Keep your eyes peeled Monday or Tuesday for a Vista and XP rundown.
Scott said 6:12PM on 9-26-2008
After reading this post, I downloaded this & gave it a try this morning. After seeing it had listed my network drive desktop shortcuts as services they obviously were not, I uninstalled it, wondering what else it erroneously listed... I'd suggest using this with EXTREME caution, or, better yet, use something more tried & true.
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Lee Mathews said 6:16PM on 9-26-2008
Uninstalled? What did you download? The app is a standalone executable.
Scott said 6:24PM on 9-26-2008
Thank you, Lee, for pointing out my mistake... What I meant was "deleted," not "uninstalled." Irrespective of that mistake, the rest of my statement still holds true.
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Lee Mathews said 6:26PM on 9-26-2008
That's very odd...I've used it on several XP and Vista systems with no errors like this. I'm going to ping the author and see if he'll comment for us and sort this out!
Lee Mathews said 9:02AM on 9-27-2008
Here's the lowdown from Michael, the app's author:
"Perhaps the user had switched the view from the View menu, which can also display and manipulate Kernel services (drivers). And as this is extremely dangerous , for you can easily render your system inoperable, I can think that the user was probably scared, because he saw things that were not in the classic (services.msc)."
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