3.7. Understanding Windows Services

In this section, I introduce you to the concept of a service within the OS and then give an overview of some of the most popular services found in Windows.

A service is a software component within the OS that provides a specific feature. For example, the spooler service provides printing functionality. For you to print, you must have the spooler service running. When you are troubleshooting a system that isn't working properly, make sure that you check that the service that manages that aspect of the OS is running. You might also want to restart the service if it is running, which is essentially rebooting that service.