One of the things I hate to see when booting up a system is that a service failed to start.

This usually means combing through the event viewer to identify the service that failed. It can be annoying because of the time you need to spend looking through unrelated events.

I wanted a way to speed up this process since I see this problem frequently in the field.

One of the tricks I use is to open service manager and sort by start type. Then I look through all of the services that are set to automatic…and make sure they are started.

I wanted to get this same information as fast as possible, so I created a script that will go through all services on a system and spit out the ones that are set to automatic and have not started.

You need to run it from the command line, and use the cscript.exe engine to execute it…like this:

cscript.exe ListFailedServices.vbs
(Download the script here)

Lets look at the output from one of my problem systems:

Today Microsoft released detailed instructions on Configuration and Troubleshooting, Collecting Data, Analyzing Issues, Testing and Mitigating Issues and an overview of the Application Compatibility Toolkit 5.0 for Windows Vista.

It includes the following documents;

• ACT Configuration and Troubleshooting
• ACT Phase1 Collecting Data
• ACT Phase2 Analyzing Issues
• ACT Phase3 Testing and Mitigating Issues
• ACT Step By Step

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