pserv.cpl 4.x

pserv is a Windows Control Panel Applet that

I wrote it partly because of being annoyed with that dreaded piece of badly designed crap called Windows 2000 MMC.

New features in 4.0

The main functionality of pserv is to manage installed system services:

As you can see, the GUI has seen quite some improvement over the 4.0 version: plus there are now many new and interesting options like Bring up Registry Editor for service key or Start CMD.EXE in installation path. The same view is also used for devices.

The Windows view gives you the option of showing all desktop windows, and controlling their appearance:

The Uninstaller view shows all currently installed programs and again provides a couple of more options than are available in the standard Programs control:

The Processes view allows you do find out rather detailed information on running processes, including some options not available in the Windows 8 task manager:

The main purpose of the Modules view is to locate DLL paths and identify load path conflicts:

Note: this version was tested only Windows 7 and Windows 8. It may or may not work on older Windows versions. If it does, drop me a line

Historical note

pserv is a really old program, in a sense:

And finally, in 2014 I completely rewrote it in C# using WPF - 16 years after the very first version...

Other new stuff

Command line switches: DEVICES, MODULES, PROCESSES, UNINSTALLER, WINDOWS, DUMPXML, START, STOP and RESTART. Nuff said

Here is a hopefully instructive example:

...
pserv4 /RESTART Apache2
...
pserv4 /DUMPXML services.xml
pserv4 /DEVICES /DUMPXML devices.xml
...

License and Download

The current version is 4.0. It is released as freeware with a very liberal, BSD-style license. The sourcecode is hosted on code.google.com. Use at own risk.