Windows services are like applets that run in the background. They can be from Microsoft and and also from third parties. They manage everything from your print queue to automatically updating apps in the background.
Sometimes we might not want particular services to be running, maybe because of high CPU usage, or maybe it’s not needed or because it’s causing a problem.
To see a list of all services, we can search for services in the Start Menu. We’ll see a desktop app in the results.
When we click this, the main Services panel will appear.
Here we have a list of all of the services that are installed in our computer, including Microsoft and third parties. We can see the name of the service, short description, status (running or not), startup type (disabled, manual or automatic).
For example, let’s check out the Fax service. It is currently not running and its startup type is manual.
To check additional properties of the Fax service, we can double-click it (or right-click it and select Properties).
Now if this service was already started then we would click the Stop button to stop it. We can change the startup type to Automatic, and that will make sure that this service will run when we power on our machine. If we leave it at Manual, we will have to manually run it.
To run a service, we can click the Start button available in its properties. When the service is started, we can then choose to stop it.
If the service is causing problems or if it is not responding, we can try and restart it.
Keep in mind that there are services that we can disable, but there is a great deal of other services, both from Microsoft and from third parties, that we shouldn’t disable, since the system stability depends on them.