I spend quite a bit of time during my day tweaking Windows services on underpowered XP and Vista computers, and the services.msc snap-in just doesn't quite cut it.

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.