Segmentation Fault: Core dumped..;-)

HOWTO: Manually uninstalling WinXP services using command-line tools

Posted : November 28, 2004 at 4:20 pm [America/Los_Angeles]

Let’s say you installed a software as a “service” in XP. Now, you want to uninstall it. And the software does not come with such an option. What a pain. Isin’t it? Well, turns out there is a fairly elegant and generic solution to this problem.

Warning:

As with any Windows Operating system, making changes to the registry should always be done with care otherwise you may end up toasting your OS. Consider yourself warned

Steps:

1. First part of the puzzle is to find the “internal” name of the service you want to delete. Here are the steps:

a. Open Start | Run | Type services.msc and hit Enter. This should open the “Services” panel.

b. Once open, find the offending service. For the sake of this HOWTO, let’s assume the service is “CYGWIN cygserver” as shown in the figure below.

c. Click on the service, right-click and select Properties

d. Just below the tab titled “General”, there should be a property called Service name: with the value to it’s left. In case of “CYGWIN cygserver”, the Service Name is “cygserver”


e. Make a note of this name.

2. Now, fire up the DOS-prompt (Start | Run…| Type ‘cmd’ and hit Enter) and type sc delete “<service-name-from-step-1-above>” as shown below:

[anand@MYXP]$sc delete “cygserver”
[SC] DeleteService SUCCESS
[anand@MYXP]$

That’s it. Confirm that the service has indeed been deleted by opening the Services panel as described in step 1a above.

HTH

- Anand

Category: Systems |