ServiceProfiles is a small power user tool to allow you to define different service profiles which you can switch between effortlessly. What follows is brief “5 minute introduction”. Download links at end.

Initial Screen

After you start the program you’ll be prompted to save a backup file. This is highly recommended as it means you can revert back all the services on you PC to exactly the state they were in when the backup was made.

With that done you should find yourself looking at something simalar the the above screenshot. Any service profiles you’ve created will be listed in the top left section while a readout of the services currently on your PC is on the right. Below is a small section with descriptions and some additional details about each service.

As the only profile at this stage id the backup which is read-only to prevent accidental changes you’ll find that if you click around in the services list a new profile will automaticially be created.

New Profile

At this stage most of the listed service will have been greyed out, this indicates that this profile will not affect those services if it is applies. Services which will be affected will have a tick beside them. For those services only two things can be changed as part of a profile, the active state and startup type. Because you may only want to specify for one of these to be affected the option is there to set the other to “(no change)”.

Importing Profiles and Sub-Profiles

A guy called Charles M. Sparks, or most commonly know online by his handle Black Viper, has put a lot of work into experimenting with services and seeing just which one you can get away without running while still having a usable system. I couldn’t hope to equal his work so I’m offering here a download of his recommended “Safe”, “Tweaked” and “Bare Bones” service profile. Note these are UNOFFICIAL until I get his blessing to ship them officially with the application.

Get them here black-vipers-xp-sp3 and import the file from the File menu. Having done select for example the tweaked profile and scroll down a bit to see what changes it will cause.

So what are we seeing exactly. As before greyed out entries will not be affected at all by applying this profile. Checked entries are all the ones the ‘Tweaked’ will affect. The blue enteries are inherited changes from the parent ‘Safe’ profile. This functionality to handle parent and child profile give you much better scope when creating your own and greatly helps if you want a couple of profiles which share a lot of common changes.

Applying a Profile

This bit is the easiest. To apply all the changes specified by a profile simply select it and click the play button in the toolbar. The events log tab at the bottom will report the success or failure of the changes. If you see failures to stop a service rebooting your computer is a good way to ensure it stops.

If you feel you did something wrong or messed up an importnat program simply apply the backup profile to restore things to the way they were. If the program for some reason doesn’t list your backup then you can load the file you saved it as from the options menu.

Downloads

ServiceProfiles 32bit (If user this is probably the version you want).
ServiceProfiles 64bit (For 64bit OSs)

Source Code (Boost opensource license)