Split services for troubleshooting purposes

In Windows you might know that a lot of services do not run as separate processes, instead many of them are actually run within the famous svchost.exe processes. To see this in action just go to a cmd.exe and type “tasklist /svc” and it will list all processes and subprocesses. It might look like:

svchost.exe    AeLookupSvc, Appinfo, AppMgmt, BITS,
               Browser, CertPropSvc, gpsvc, IKEEXT,
               iphlpsvc, LanmanServer, MMCSS, ProfSvc,
               Schedule, SENS, SessionEnv,
               ShellHWDetection, Themes, Winmgmt, wuauserv

If you need to do some troubleshooting or investigate something related to a certain process that is running with other services you can split this service to make in run in its own process. This is done by using the command:

sc.exe config servicename wuauserv type= own

Which in this case makes sure that the Windows Update service (wuauserv) will be run in its own process, for you to troubleshoot. Set it back to its original setting by changing “own” to “share” in the above command. You can find more information about this in KB934650.