How to Delete Services Using PowerShell

1. Deleting a Service Using the Command Line in PowerShell
2. Deleting a Service Using PowerShell

There will be multiple situations where we need to clean the services up. This problem was caused by uninstalling software leaving its driver entries or service in the registry.

Windows will try to load them at every boot, fails, and log the error to the System Event log at every startup.

This article tells us how to delete an orphaned service in Windows 10 and earlier using the command-line and PowerShell.

Deleting a Service Using the Command Line in PowerShell

The sc.exe legacy command-line tool in Windows can create, read, edit, or delete Windows Services. To remove services in Windows, use the following command-line syntax from admin Command Prompt.

Please ensure that you run in an elevated command prompt with administrator privileges.

sc delete service_name

The value service_name refers to the short name of the service instead of its display name. Open the Services MMC and double-click the service you want to check to find the short name.

Deleting a Service Using PowerShell

You can also run the sc.exe command in PowerShell.

We need to specify the extension sc.exe when running it in PowerShell because the command SC in PowerShell will be interpreted as Set-Content, a built-in cmdlet in PowerShell.

sc.exe delete service_name

To get the name of the service to be removed, run Get-Service on the machine known to have the orphaned service. We will use the column marked Name for the service name in the PowerShell script.

Get-Service

We can use the following native commands from the PowerShell administrator window to delete a service.

$service = Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_Service -Filter "Name='servicename'"
$service.delete()

It’s even easier if we have PowerShell 6.0 installed. In PowerShell 6 and higher, you can use this syntax to remove a service:

Remove-Service -Name ServiceName

Running the Remove-Service command in older versions of PowerShell below 6.0 shows the error:

The Remove-Service cmdlet is not recognized as the name of a cmdlet, function, script file, or operable program.