Last week I engaged in a few interesting email exchanges regarding NT services. In one exchange, which referred back to last year's November 11, 1997 article, Internet Explorer 4 on NT, the user found that the Protected Storage service (pstores.exe), which installs with Internet Explorer 4 and takes up a good chunk of RAM, but which appears relatively useless in IE4 (unless you use the MS Wallet application), is required running for Outlook Express 98.
Indeed, and right on que, nt.zdnet.com's Russ Cooper wrote a rather in-depth article, "Service Pack 4: No Browser Required?", regarding the Protected Storage service. (In effect, you didn't need to install IE4 to use SP3 or the Option -- you just needed the Protected Storage service which is installed with IE4)
Running an Application as a Service
The other relevant email exhange dealt with NTVDM running the CPU up to nearly 100% when running certain 16-bit applications some of the time.
The user had installed SP3 (a common answer to the NTVDM problem), to no avail. Finally, he ended up making the application (Word 2.0) a service, and now it seems to runs fine all the time (except he has to remember to turn the "service" off manually when he's finished with the application).
srvany.exe, available in the Resource Kit, allows you to easily add an application as a service. While the Resource Kit Help file indicates that not all 16-bit applications may function well as services, it certainly might be worth a shot if you're having similar CPU-hogging problems. The usage is as follows:
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instsrv {AnyName} {drive}:\{path}\srvany.exe
You can run any number of applications this way, as long as each has a different service name ("AnyName" in the above example).
Services are applications that launch at startup (either on boot or when called by another program), without need for intervention from the user. They can run without anyone logged on.
Services can be managed through the Control Panel applet Services. From this applet, you can view all registered services, their current running status, and their startup type (ie, System, Automatic, Manual, or Disabled). Furthermore, you can start and stop services from this applet.
You can also start and stop services using the console's net start and net stop commands. If you do this, you can call a service by its "display name" (see below... it's the name of the service as it appears in the Services applet), as long as you put the name in quotes, like:
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