I occasionally find myself starting and stopping multiple windows services. The only tool I’m aware of for stopping and starting windows services is the ‘Services’ program under ‘Administrative Tools’ (%SystemRoot%\system32\services.msc /s). This program seems to only allow you to manipulate one service at a time, often pausing while it waits for the service to stop. There is a ‘Close’ button available, but I’d prefer to just select all the services I want to stop or start, and perform a single command on all of them at one time.
Is there an easier way to start and stop multiple windows services for Windows XP?
It possible to start/stop Windows services by using command-line tools such as net start and net stop and sc.exe, but as far as I known none of them allows to operate on more than one service at once.
The easiest solution is to invoke the command-line tool multiple times by specifying different service names in a batch file.
Also, note that the reason why there is a delay between issuing a stop command to a Windows Service and the time when the process actually exits, is due to the fact that the Windows Service Controller waits up to 30 seconds to allow services to shutdown properly.
If a service doesn’t exit by that time, a message will inform you that ‘the service didn’t respond in a timely fashion‘. More details can be found here.