How to fix hanging services

[Supore]

Hello guys and gals, today I wanted to give all of you a short tutorial on how to fix hanging services. What can these do? They can:

 

- Allow programs not to be able to function

- Cause crashes

- Cause huge performance drainage on normal tasks, like opening File Explorer

 

Now you may ask: "Supore, what's a 'hanging' service?", well, a hanging service is a service that is stuck in a starting/stopping fase, and thus draining your resources by not being active, nor being shut down.

 

The first step is going to be: identifying the hanging service.

This can be done by doing the following:

 

Windows <7: Open Task Manager by pressing the key combination Ctrl + Shift + Esc. Once there, go to the 'Services' tab, and click the 'Services' button at the bottom.

Windows 8>: Open Task Manager by pressing the key combination Ctrl + Shift + Esc. Once there, go to the 'Services' tab, and click the text 'Open Services' next to the cogwheels at the bottom.

(Alternate method: type 'services.msc' into your search bar and press enter)

 

From there, sort the processes by status by clicking on the 'Status' bar twice. Now you should see a whole lot of running services:

 

 

From there, scroll down until you find the switch-over from 'Running' to blank:

 

 

As you can see, I have a clear line between 'Running' and blank, indicating I have no hanging services. However, if you do see a service that says 'Starting'/'Stopping', you have a hanging service. To fix that, we're going to continue with step 2: finding the PID.

 

Right click the task, and click 'Properties'. The following window should pop up:

 

 

In this case I've taken the Windows Update service as an example.

At the top, you can identify the name; 'wuauserv' in this case. Take good note of that name.

 

Next, open your Command Prompt as an administrator. This can be done by doing the following:

 

Windows 7/8: Open your search bar (either via the Start button (Windows 7) or the Charms Bar (Windows 8)), and type in 'cmd'. Now only one program should pop up. Right click the program, and click 'Run as Administrator' (this is to ensure that the Command Prompt has full access to all services).

 

Now type in the following command:

 

sc queryex servicename

 

Whereas the 'servicename' is the name you noted down. Press enter. Now a bunch of information should show up:

 

 

Take note of the PID (532 in this case). Write it down if necessary.

Now the final step of solving your hanging service problem: stopping the service.

To do this, type in the following command

 

taskkill /f /pid PID

 

Whereas the 'PID' is the PID you noted down. Press enter. The service should now be stopped!

 

 

If you refresh your 'Services' now, you should see that the hung service is now terminated. Success!

"But Supore", you might ask, "How do I go about turning it on again?"

To do this, enter the following command:

 

net start servicename

 

Whereas the 'servicename' is the name you noted down. There we go:

 

 

Whoops! The service was already started. Let me fix that really quickly...

 

 

That's better.

 

 

 

So there you have it! Fixing hung services can make programs work again (such as Windows Update and BITS), improve performance (Windows Update), and fix eventual crashes.

 

If there are any problems, note them down below, I'll respond as soon as possible.