[ajgmisc]

When I need to diagnose a performance problem, I invariably end up looking at the Services tab in msconfig. There I find many items with UNKNOWN for the manufacturer. Some have the manufacturer's name within the item name, so it's not a problem to remember what they are. For the rest, I've almost always looked at and researched them before, and I have made a list with notes so that I don't have to redo that research each time. Of course, looking at the list (and for it) wouldn't be necessary if I could fill in the Manufacturer entry for these items.

I started poking around in the registry to figure out if this was possible, but then I realized that many people may be able to tell me how to do it. One of you other geeks must know?

[Advertisements]

You won't find the service manufacturer name in the registry.

The manufacturer entries are generated by looking at the file that creates the service. If it doesn't find it there or finds it in a format it doesn't like, it'll list it as Unknown.

As a general rule you can usually work out what programme a service belongs to just by looking at the directory structure.

MSConfig is not the best program to use to disable Windows Services with; because it doesn't tell you what services rely on other services to run properly. Much better scenario: Start -> Run, type "services.msc" instead. From here you can see what is dependent on what to run and it will not let you take anything critical out (which you can with MSConfig if it was to be hijacked in the future).

[Neil Jones]

You won't find the service manufacturer name in the registry.

The manufacturer entries are generated by looking at the file that creates the service. If it doesn't find it there or finds it in a format it doesn't like, it'll list it as Unknown.

As a general rule you can usually work out what programme a service belongs to just by looking at the directory structure.

MSConfig is not the best program to use to disable Windows Services with; because it doesn't tell you what services rely on other services to run properly. Much better scenario: Start -> Run, type "services.msc" instead. From here you can see what is dependent on what to run and it will not let you take anything critical out (which you can with MSConfig if it was to be hijacked in the future).

[ajgmisc]

Thanks for the information, Neil. Since I made my initial post, I discovered that the manufacturer name entries are not in the registry, but I had no idea where else they might be stored. You are right -- for items in the Startup tab of msconfig, the directory structure is often an adequate indication of what the item relates to. But this is not the case in the Services tab.

Since I cannot fix the UNKNOWN manufacturer problem (unless there's a way to fix the files that create the UNKNOWN services), I'm still curious as to whether it's possible and okay to change the Service or Startup Item names to be more descriptive (some of these already have the mfr name within them). These names are in the registry, aren't they?

I also appreciate your suggestion that I use services.msc instead of msconfig; I'll try it (I've always hated msconfig)!