Manually Remove a Windows Service

I needed to remove some services the other day and could not recall the name of the tool that allows you to easily add and remove services from Windows. I think it’s srvany.exe, but I have no idea how recently it has been updated, and I couldn’t find it anyway.

So I needed to remove a service and I couldn’t figure it out. Until I stumbled across this piece of sage advice.

Namely, find your way to this registry location:

 HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/CurrentControlSet/Services

Locate the service you want to get rid of, and delete its key. Done. You may want to stop the service first, since you won’t be able to once it’s gone (and you may not even be able to remove the service until it’s stopped). You might also want to check any filenames used in the key for the service, so that you can also remove the files associated with the service.