Service Manager, Manage Services, Drivers Locally and Remotely

Tech savvy Windows users know that they can manage the operating systems’ Services either from the System Configuration tool msconfig or the Service management software Services which can be launched by typing in services.msc in the run box.

Service Manager now is a free third party program that home users and administrators can use to manage services and drivers not only on a local PC running Windows, but also on other PCs of a computer network.

The program is offered as a portable version and installer. I personally had problems with the installer (it would simply hang until its process was killed) and no problems whatsoever with the portable version.

When you first run Service Manager you will see all Windows Services in a table. Services are listed with their name, type, start type, status, process ID, account, path, version, language and activation time among other values.

A click on a table header sorts all services this way, which can for instance be handy to display all started services or services owned by a specific company next to each other. When you enable admin tasks you can manage one or multiple services directly from within the program interface. It is then for instance possible to start, stop or restart services.

A double-click on a service opens a new window that lists all service parameters. Here it is also possible to change the service and start type, as well as user account and password the service is started from.

A filter at the top offers to hide or display active, inactive or Microsoft services. You could uncheck the MS box to hide all Microsoft services from the listing.

The second option that the program offers is to display Driver related information in a similar listing. You can either display drivers and services mixed, or only one of them. Drivers are also displayed with their name, type, start type and a handful of additional values. A double-click opens a similar detailed listing of parameters, and the links at the bottom of the interface offer the same management options like starting or stopping drivers on the system.

The third option offered by the program is to connected to a remote host to display its services and drivers in the listing.

The menu bar at the top links to several interesting features. This includes options to export the listing into a csv file, to start the Event Viewer or Task Manager, or an option to create a new system service.

Windows users can download Service Manager from the developer website. The program is compatible with 32-bit and 64-bit editions of the Microsoft Windows operating system.

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© Martin Brinkmann for gHacks Technology News | Latest Tech News, Software And Tutorials, 2011. | Permalink |
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Post tags: drivers, portable software, service manager, windows drivers, windows services, windows software

Backing up and Restoring Windows Drivers

The hardware driver support in Windows 7 is just fantastic, especially with consumer hardware with more and more companies submitting their drivers for official certification from Microsoft than ever before.  This not only means driver support on the Windows 7 installation DVD, but also through Windows Update.  You can still find computers however for which the driver support is lacking, my own laptop, the Dell M6600 is a great example of this where the drivers for the graphics (both internal Intel and nVidia), USB3, biometrics, touch-panel, Wi-Fi, Ethernet and SD Card reader are not installed automatically by Windows, nor by Windows Update.  Each one requires a driver download from the Dell website (which is annoying!)

So how do you back up the drivers in your Windows installation and how can you use these?  In all versions of Windows the drivers are stored in the C:\Windows\System32 folder in the sub-folders Drivers, DriverStore and if your installation has one, DRVSTORE.  These folders contain all the hardware drivers for your operating system.  In the folder location, C represents the drive on which you have Windows installed, this may be a different letter on your system.

You can simply copy these folders out to seperate storage (DO NOT MOVE THEM) such as an external USB drive or Pen Drive.  When time comes to reinstall the drivers you can copy the folders back.

Now there are a couple of ways to reinstall the drivers.  The easiest way is to simply restart the PC when the driver folders have been copied back to see if Windows automatically detects drivers for uninstalled hardware.  This is possible, but won’t be the case for all your hardware.

To install drivers for the missing hardware you need to open the Device Manager.  You can do this by typing Device Manager into the search box in the Start Menu.  You will see all your uninstalled drivers highlighted with a small yellow warning triangle icon.  You need to Right-Click on each one and select Update Driver.  Because the correct drivers are already in the drivers folders on your computer, telling Windows to find the drivers automatically should always install the correct one.  You may however, in some cases, have to tell the Device Manager which folder to look for.  You can either point it directly to one of the two drivers folders, or just at the System32 folder; making sure you tick the box “include subfolders”.

There is an important caveat with this.  The drivers for 64 bit (x64) and 32 bit (x86) versions of Windows are usually different.  This means that if you copy x86 drivers into an x64 copy of Windows; or vice-versa, they will not install.  Windows will recognise them as being incorrect.  You cannot use this method therefore when migrating your system from the 32-bit version of Windows to the 64-bit version when, for example, adding more memory to your PC.

You CAN use this method to migrate drivers between Windows Vista and Windows 7 (and back again) as both operating system share the same driver model, but again not between x86 and x64 builds.  You CAN’T use this to migrate Windows XP drivers to Vista or Windows 7 however as Windows XP uses an older driver model and the hardware drivers for XP are not compatible with the newer versions of Windows.

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© Mike Halsey (MVP) for gHacks Technology News | Latest Tech News, Software And Tutorials, 2011. | Permalink |
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Post tags: backup, drivers, restore, vista, Windows, windows 7, xp