Cloud, Big Data and Mobile

The Task Scheduler service has become an essential part of Windows. With that in mind, Microsoft has made a change in the way this service works. You can no longer stop it and the service automatically starts when you start Windows. The idea is to ensure that the service is available to meet Windows needs. The change quietly occurred during a Vista update and is automatically part of Windows 7. Consequently, when you try to interact with the service, you get an error message of [SC] OpenService FAILED 5: Access is denied. To see this for yourself, try typing SC Config Schedule Start= Demand and pressing Enter on an update Vista or any Windows 7 system.

The reason I mention this particular issue is that on page 43 of , you see instructions for interacting with the Task Scheduler service. You can still query the service and perform some other tasks with it, but you can’t stop it or configure the method used to start it. When you look at this service using the Services console of the Administrative Tools folder, you see that you can’t even change how the service starts as shown here (everything is grayed out).

There are a number of other services that fall into this same category. You can’t stop, start, or reconfigure them. Here is a list of the most common services that you can’t control using the SC utility (you can still query all of them):

• DCOM Server Process Launcher
• Group Policy Client
• Plug and Play