Windows Vista in a Nutshell

Appendix E. Services

Table E-1 lists the background services installed by default in Windows Vista. Note that some of the following may not be present in your system (depending on your Windows edition or installed components), and you may see some services on your own computer that aren’t listed here (which may have been added after you installed Windows Vista).

One of the advantages of services over standard applications and drivers is that they are run when Windows starts, but before a user logs in.

Services can be started, stopped, and configured to automatically start with the Services utility (services.msc). By default, most of the services listed in Table E-1 will remain dormant (stopped) until started by the user (directly or indirectly by starting a program that depends on these services). For more information on services, see "Microsoft Management Console,” in Chapter 10.

Warning

If you disable any service, any other services that explicitly depend on it will fail to start. So be careful before disabling services, and if you find that one refuses to start, it may be because a service on which it depends has been disabled. Check the Event Viewer (see Chapter 11) for error messages from services.

Table E-1. Services in Windows Vista

Name	Filename	Description
Application Experience	svchost.exe	Processes application compatibility cache requests for applications when they are launched.
Application Information	svchost.exe	Helps interactive applications run with additional ...