Ever have one of those programs that just won’t uninstall cleanly? I especially hate it when a program leaves a bunch of services that still manage to start, and lock files in their directory.

I ran across a nifty command to help remove at least the service portion of those programs, so that you can then remove the files in those folders. In a command prompt just type:

“SC delete %servicename%”

The tricky part to this is that the service name isn’t necessarily what appears in the services applet.

If you open the service that you want to delete, the top of the general tab has “Service name:” on top. That is the service name that you should use.

If we were removing the “Google Updater Service” in the picture below. We would use the name “gusvc”. Click on the picture for the full sized version.

Posted in Command Prompt, Windows 3 Comments »