Ever wonder how to disable a service in Windows
or uninstall an application to remove the services that support it?
Well, I'm going to show you how to do both, coming up now.
Hello, everybody.
I'm Adam Gordon, an Edutainer here at ITProTV,
coming at you with another exciting
and fun-filled episode on Windows Server.
How you can make the most out of it,
and what you can do to demystify the experience.
We're going to take a look at two things
that I often get asked about.
I talk to customers, talk to students,
I'm in the field working, a lot of people say,
“Hey, as surprising as this is,
how do I disable a service running in Windows?”
"I got this piece of software that's installed,
I don't want it running,
can't seem to get rid of that service, what can I do?”
Well, disabling a service, we could do that.
No problem.
But you know what?
We can not only disable the service;
you can actually remove it
if we simply remove the application
that the service is associated with.
Almost without exception, it'll go away as well.
I'm going to show you how to do both in this episode,
and guess what?
I'm going to show you how to do it
across multiple versions of the Windows Server Operating System.
Server 2016, Server 2019,
and of course, the most recent version, Server 2022;
it doesn't matter what you're running;
the process is the same.
We go to the same place, we do the same things,
and it always turns out the same way.
Join me here, if you will.
We're going to do this on Server 2019.
I'm running it as a virtual machine, as you can see.
But remember, everything I'm about to show you
is going to look and feel the same,
whether it's 16, 19, or 22,
at the end of that Windows Server sentence
that you may be uttering,
let's take a look at the first way to do this.
We're going to go in;
we're going to open up our services management console
because that's where all the Windows services
that are running are easily exposed and available.
Now we have a couple of ways to do that.
We can do this the old-fashioned way.
We can go to the Server Manager, go to the tools menu,
look for the Services Element, open it up from there.
I'll show you that in a moment.
We can also go to the run line and type "services.msc.
And by doing that, we open up the services console directly.
There's always at least three ways
to be able to do anything in Windows;
as you often hear me say,
it's really up to you to decide how you want to do this.
We can even do this from the command line
if we want to use PowerShell
or the Windows Command console;
we can go in and do this directly from within the command line.
But we're going to spare you that for now;
we'll do this in the graphical environment.
So join me here.
I'm going to open up the server manager.
I just already have it opened and reduced on the Taskbar.
And I'm going to go over here to the Tools menu right there,
and the tools are listed alphabetically, which we like,
and you can see right at the bottom
kind of poking its head up right down there.
It's going to be the services element.
If I click on that, I'll open the services console,
and we'll be able to manage it,
the Microsoft Management console right from there.
But I said I could also do this by going to the run line.
So let's right-click on the Start Menu,
go to run, see that right down there.
When I do that, I just have to know
what to type in the run line,
and I already told you what I would type there,
“services.msc" for the Microsoft console
that will bring up the services area.
And I can do that, and I've already done that.
When I do that, I get this right here,
and hopefully, this looks familiar to you,
so where we can manage our services.
Now, I can go and look for the service in question,
whatever service it may be,
and I'm going to use the Adobe Acrobat Update service.
I've installed Adobe Acrobat, so we can work with that.
We'll ultimately remove that application,
removing this service as well,
but we'll begin by disabling the service
just to show you how to do that.
You'll see currently because Adobe Acrobat is installed
that the service runs all the time behind the scenes,
and I can tell that its status is currently set to running.
You'll see that right here.
Let's just move this over, so you can see this.
And we can see when I highlight it
that it is set to running
and it is set to start up automatically,
which means even if I restart the machine,
the service will kick right back in
as soon as we log on
and be running pretty much all the time,
which may or may not be a good thing.
So if we want to disable it, we can do a couple of things.
People often look here on the left-hand side
under the service when we highlight it,
and they see the shortcuts for stop and restart,
scratch your head going, Oh, I can stop it,
but it restarts every time I restart the machine
because it's set to start automatically,
and that's not the same thing as disabling it.
Disabling it means it's not going to start up again
until we change that status.
We don't have an option for that from here,
but we do have an option; we just have to know where to go.
A lot of people say,
“Well, I'll right-click, I must be able to do it from there.”
Well, we can, but it's not where you think it is.
Notice we don't have an option to disable,
but we do have the same options to stop and restart,
resume, pause, et cetera.
But we have properties.
And sure enough, if we go and look in properties,
we're going to find what we're looking for.
Let's go to properties, and the properties
of all the services will look pretty much the same.
And what we can see here is that under startup type,
when I pull down,
you'll notice I do have an option right at the bottom there
to actually disable the service,
but I have to go into the properties
and look at the startup type and set it to disable to do that.
When I do that, you'll notice it is still running,
so I should probably stop it first.
Now it's stopped; now I can disable it.
Now I can apply that, now I can click OK,
and sure enough, that status is now set to "disabled"
as opposed to "automatic.”
And if I restart the machine,
that service will not start back up until I change that status.
Now, if all you want to do is disable the service, drop the mic, we're done.
But if you want to uninstall the app and, by extension,
remove that service along with it from the system?
Well, we've got to go to a different place
and do some different stuff
because we can't remove services from here.
We can only manage their current operational status
and set that status to disabled,
essentially turning them off permanently,
but they're still installed on the system.
So if I want to remove that,
what I have to do is to follow in, and let's just go in.
Let me just turn the status of this startup
type back to automatic
just so that we won't have any issues uninstalling the program.
We'll just put that back the way we found it.
We're going to close this, and what we're going to do
is come over here to the Start Menu.
Let me just zoom in so you could see that.
And what we're going to do is I'm going to go up here
to our settings icon right there.
We're going to click on that.
And when we get in there,
we're going to come over here to the apps tile.
We're going to uninstall,
which is one of the options right there, and uninstall the app.
So we have to simply know what we're going to look for.
And sure enough, right here at the top of the list,
we see Adobe Acrobat Reader; it's currently installed.
That didn't show you that it is running.
You could see the service was running,
but let's just click it
just to make sure you could see it really is active.
It is there, it is installed, everything is good,
and I could use it right now if I wanted to.
We're going to go ahead and uninstall it.
We'll go back here, I'm going to highlight the app,
and when we do that, we have two options,
modify and or uninstall;
well, we want to say goodbye to Adobe.
I'm going to go ahead and uninstall that, right?
Are we sure?
Yeah, we're sure.
Let's go ahead and do that.
We let the wizard do it.
Every program is slightly different.
It may or may not involve you in it.
It may ask you for some input.
You may have to click yes and give it permission.
A little bit different, depending on the app.
But it seems to be gone, and sure enough, it looks like it is.
Shortcut is gone.
If we go to our Start Menu,
we don't see it here anywhere in the program list.
And if we go and we look for our services,
let's go to tools, let's go to services.
We'll bring that console back up.
And we take a look alphabetically right up here;
we can see that Adobe Service is indeed gone.
Let's bring that over so you could see that.
The Adobe service, the update
or service for Adobe Acrobat
has been removed along with the program.
If I restart the machine,
it's not coming back unless I reinstall it.
And if I restart the machine, that service is no longer present.
It's not going to start back up because I've removed it.
So whether you want to disable a service
or you want to remove that service
by removing the applications that support it.
You can do either or both from the services console
as well as from the app area inside of settings.
And it really is pretty straightforward;
you just go to know where to go, what to do,
and of course, always remember you could do this
the same way across multiple versions
of the Windows Server Operating System.
I'll continue to come back with new and exciting opportunities
to show you how you can optimize
your Windows Server usage and admin experience,
but until I do for the next episode,
I'm going to wish you happy windowing,
and I'll see you soon.