Ever need to update a Windows Service? I had a problem today at work, my PC was incorrectly setup by the technical services team, one of my services’ “Path to Executable” was pointing at the wrong .exe. I had seen the sc.exe command-line command before for creating services, but I only wanted to modify an existing service.

Luckily I found a page online that mentioned these settings are in the registry. Browse to the following hive and see all the settings for your service that you can modify, and at least the “Path to Executable” seemed to take effect immediately with no reboot (Windows XP Pro SP2).

DISLAIMER: Do this at your own risk! As always touching the registry is risque business

\\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
\SYSTEM
\CurrentControlSet
\Services
\___YOUR_SERVICE_NAME___