Dave Hildebrand.com

Remove a Windows Service

Wednesday, May 6th, 2009 | Tech Help

Last night I moved my PRTG virtual machine to my newly installed ESXi server. The move went well, but when I went to boot up the PRTG VM the service wouldn’t start. PRTG was nice enough to tell me that I had another copy of the service running on the network and even gave me the command to find the PC it was running on.

Turns out it was running on an old monitoring PC I had used years before that was still powered on. Since I still use it for a couple of other monitoring apps I couldn’t just turn it off. As a temp fix I stopped the service and set it to disabled. Now the PRTG VM started up and began collecting data once again.

As the PRTG uninstaller did not remove the PRTG service from the old monitoring PC I still needed a way to pitch it even though I had disabled it. A quick search turned up a couple of options, the easy way and the slightly more difficult way.

The Easy Way:

sc delete “service_name”

In my case the command was:
sc delete PRTGService

The Slightly More Difficult Way:

**Dislaimer: This process involves working in the Windows Registry. Before deleting any file please make a backup in case of borking your system.

Run Regedit

Find the registry entry “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/CurrentControlSet/Services”

Look for the service there and delete it.

Tags: prtg, registry, virtulization, windows

2 Comments to Remove a Windows Service

Dirk Paessler
May 7, 2009

Hi Dave,

there were two or three version of PRTG that did not properly remove the service. We are sorry for the trouble.

Another option would have been to upgrade to the latest version and then deinstall PRTG. The current installer removes the service properly.

Dirk Paessler
Paessler AG, CEO

Dave
May 31, 2009

Dirk,

Thanks for stopping by and giving everyone an additional option on how to remove the service.

Dave