If you are a fan of tweaking your organisation and disabling services, you might find that over time your Windows Services list becomes large and unwieldy. It'south like shooting fish in a barrel enough to delete a Windows service using the Control Prompt.

RELATED: Should You Disable Windows Services to Speed Upwards Your PC?

A big warning, though. When you delete a service, it's gone—and services tin be a existent pain to get back. We actually don't recommend deleting services at all, unless yous're dealing with a very particular situation like cleaning up afterward a program uninstalled improperly or rooting out a malware infestation. Typically, but disabling a service is plenty, especially if all you're really trying to exercise is tweak your system performance (which probably won't piece of work as well as you might promise, anyway).  That said, if you do demand to delete a service, you merely demand to notice the actual name of that service and and so issue a single command from the Command Prompt.

The techniques we're covering hither should work in pretty much whatever version of Windows—from XP all the way up through 10.

Pace Ane: Find the Name of the Service You lot Want to Delete

The outset thing you'll need to do is identify the full name of the service you desire to delete. In our example, we're using the RetailDemo service—a curious thing that activates a subconscious command for changing Windows into a retail service mode (and pretty much erasing all personal docs and resetting your PC to information technology's default state), and then it'due south really a good example of a service you might not desire around.

Striking Kickoff, type "services" into the search box, and so click the "Services" result.

In the "Services" window, curlicue down and find the service you're after. Right-click the service and cull the "Properties" command.

In the service's backdrop window, copy (or write down) the text to the right of the "Service name" entry.

When you lot have the service's name, you can go alee and shut the backdrop window and the "Services" window.

Step Two: Delete the Service

Now that you accept the name of the service you want to delete, you'll demand to open up the Command Prompt with authoritative privileges to do the deleting.

Click Showtime, and then type "cmd" into the search box. Correct-click the "Control Prompt" result, and and then choose the "Run as administrator" control.

At the Command Prompt, you lot'll use the post-obit syntax:

sc delete                ServiceName              

So, to delete the "RetailDemo" service we're using in our example, we'd type the following text, and and then hit Enter:

sc delete RetailDemo

Note: If the service you're deleting has any spaces in the proper noun, you'll have to enclose the name in quotes when you type the control.

Now, if you employ the F5 fundamental to refresh your Services listing, you'll meet that the service is gone.


Deleting a service in Windows is pretty easy, but we'd again like to caution you to call up long and hard before deleting a service, because it'due south very hard to get them back once they're gone.