Windows Services, what changed from Windows 7 to Windows 8

Nearly 3 years ago I wrote a blog post about the Windows Services changes between Windows Vista and Windows 7. Assuming that we won’t see any big changes with regard to Services when Windows 8 will be released I repeated the exercise by looking at what has changed between Windows 7 Enterprise and the Windows 8 Consumer Preview Build.

To obtain the services data from each system, i executed the following PowerShell command:

gwmi win32_service | select Displayname, Started, StartMode, State  | format-table | out-file c:\data\services.txt

On Windows 7 we had approximately 146 Services and now on Windows 8 there are 161. But taking into account that Hyper-V already comes with 6 services there isn’t a huge increase. When looking at the below table it might appear that Windows 8 has some new services and some have been removed, but be careful here, I haven’t verified each individual service, but it appears that some Services just have been renamed. A good example is the Service called “Optimize drives” that appears to replace the Windows 7 Service called “Disk Defragmenter”.

Furthermore there are a number of Services where the Start mode has changed, however note that results can differ depending on the device you’re running. For this comparison I installed both Windows 7 and Windows 8 within a Virtual Machine.

For more details on Windows 8 Services I also recommend the following sources:

TechNet Wiki – Windows 8 Services (Developer preview state)
What’s New In Windows 8 Services by chentiangemalc
Windows blog – Reducing runtime memory in Windows 8 under “Service changes and reductions” (note that this article was written before Consumer Preview)

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