How To Delete/Remove Services In Windows XP and Vista

Users can usually uninstall applications from their computers quite easily, however the same cannot be said for Windows services, of course you can disable a service, but the entry for it may still remain.

If you are looking for a way to completely delete a service in Windows XP and Vista, you are in the right place.

In this post we will see the steps for deleting a Windows service completely, rather than just disabling it.

Note: You should always delete services in safe mode, lest it causes you any problem, you may also want to create system restore points, just in case something goes wrong, check out a tool that will allow you to create system restore points with a single click.

Step 1: Press Start –> Run and type in 「services.msc」 without the quotes and hit the Enter key.

Step 2: In the Services applet, find the service that you want to delete permanently, right click it and click on the Properties from the menu.

Step 3: In the properties window, find the name of the service and copy it to your clipboard.

You may also want to stop the service, if it is running, this will kill all the running processes for it.

Step 4: Open a command prompt, by going to Start –> Run and type in 「cmd」 without the quotes and hit the Enter key.

Once a command prompt has opened up, type the command 「sc delete service name」 without the quotes, replace service name, with the name of the service you copied in step 3.

Once a service has been deleted you should see a message saying 「[SC] DeleteService SUCCESS」, this should mean that the service has been deleted, to ensure that, just click on the refresh button in the services applet and confirm that the service has been deleted.

These are the only steps you require to delete services in Windows XP and Windows Vista, you do not require to install or download additional softwares to do it.