Disabling services from Windows 8… for good

One of the things that I do to tweak my PC entirely is disable services, but some services can’t be disable by normal users or using the services.msc command. Some services need to be removed, and I’m not talking about unistalling them, but to disable them entirely by removing the .dll file that handles the service.

This is a very weird thing to do, but since you’re not uninstalling the service, you can “enable” it back again by rolling back the changes, pretty easy, actually.

Now, first you need to find the service you want to disable forever… something no one use… let’s say, Windows Image Adquisition (WIA). First you need to be on the services management console. Open the Run prompt and type “services.msc”.

In there you need to find the service “Windows Image Acquisition” and double click it. Stop it and disable it.

 

Now, for this service in specific, the .dll file is “wiaservc.dll” (here’s more info). What we need to do is rename this file into anything we want. Go to C:\Windows\System32, find the file, proceed to rename.

 

(Need help to rename, try Unlocker)

Now, if you go to the service management console, you should see that you can’t start the service and the description is completely gone.

Although I show you this with Windows processes, it can also apply to non-Windows processes, such as Skype Updater, Google Update, PunkBuster, and in some cases malwares. Of course, try to avoid doing this, only do it when it turn itself back on or you can’t disable/stop it and need to do some hard work manually.

PS: If you don’t know which .dll belongs to which service, you can either Google it or check this page.