If programmer Nir Sofer ever stops creating incredibly useful little tools like this one, it's going to feel like one of the stars in the sky has been extinguished. ServiWin is a relatively recent addition to his clutch of utilities, a program that replaces (and in some ways augments) the Control Panel | Administrative Tools | Services module in Windows.
Like other NirSoft tools, ServiWin can be unpacked anywhere and needs no installer to run. When started, it displays a list of all the available drivers and services in the system, in the same grid-report fashion as many of NirSoft's other programs, so an admin can then sort and filter them.
The program uses color-coding to distinguish the state of each service or driver, and an admin can sort on any of the available columns (many more than are available in the regular Services module). All or part of the report can be exported in several formats.
If you have another instance of Windows installed somewhere, you can start the program in "offline" mode and edit that instance's services list. ServiWin can also manage the service/driver list of a machine that's accessible remotely.
Note: The program shows either drivers orservices; you can toggle between them pressing F7 and F8. It doesn't show both in the same view, because of the differences in how items in each category are enumerated.
ServiWin does not currently allow you to change how a given service recovers from an error—a function that's in the Services module, but not reproduced here. Still, the program is continually evolving, so that function may be included in a future iteration.
About the author: Serdar Yegulalp is editor of the Windows Power Users Newsletter, which is devoted to hints, tips, tricks, news and goodies for Windows NT, Windows 2000 and Windows XP users and administrators. He has more than 10 years of Windows experience under his belt, and contributes regularly to SearchWinComputing.com and SearchSQLServer.com.
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