Possible to alter services loaded at startup from outside the Windows installation?

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Gman1979

Gawd
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Sep 21, 2011
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I'm trying to fix a friend's laptop without having to completely wipe it.

I can get it to load Windows( Win7 Home Premium) normally and in safe mode, but it takes almost 10 minutes to do either. Then once Windows is loaded, it's crippled in an odd way. Any time I try to open a menu, the menu freezes for 2 to three minutes, then may or may not eventually load.

The command prompt fails to load no matter how I try to start it, the control panel loads but has no icons in it, none of the MMC panels will load even after they show up as running in Task Manager so I am unable to access services.msc.

At first I suspected malware of some sort, so I took the drive out and added it to one of my laptops as a second drive. No malware was detected even after running several full scans using multiple tools (Malwarebytes, ESET, Spybot S&D, Avast, Kapersky). The drive has no bad sectors, and it's S.M.A.R.T. readings are all within norms. I also ruled out the laptop overheating as a possible cause. I also tried going back to a previous system restore point with no change in the issues.

The person who owns the laptop said everything started acting up after they installed McAfee. I can't access any of the normal routes of uninstalling it to see if it's the problem from inside the Windows installation itself.

Is there a way to manually edit the start up services from outside of the Windows installation so that I could disable McAfee from loading? At this point I'm more interested in finding out the cause of the issue than just wiping the drive and restoring Windows.
 
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Gman1979 said:
The person who owns the laptop said everything started acting up after they installed McAfee. I can't access any of the normal routes of uninstalling it to see if it's the problem from inside the Windows installation itself.
Click to expand...

Would I be correct in thinking that CPU usage is 100%? At least on one core? If so, I've seen this before, a good many years ago: we accidentally had two different virus checkers installed on the same PC. One was McAfee and they fought each other.
 
Quartz-1 said:
Would I be correct in thinking that CPU usage is 100%? At least on one core? If so, I've seen this before, a good many years ago: we accidentally had two different virus checkers installed on the same PC. One was McAfee and they fought each other.
Click to expand...

I've encountered that issue before, but it manifested a bit differently this time. There was no software for it to compete with. When task manager would load (after a minute or two delay), cpu usage would show as zero for McAfee. But without task manager open I could tell something was using 100% cpu due to the laptops fans spinning up, and physically feeling the heat on my lap. Once I ruled out an overheating issue, I knew something was hogging resources.

Disabling the startup services for McAfee fixed the issue completely and saved me the hassle of doing a clean wipe.

And ty again Demon10000. That article was exactly what I needed. Just wish it had been as simple as changing an init script in a text editor like in Linux :p
 
Actually, it pretty much is. You boot to the Safe Mode command prompt and can disable the services from there.
 
Quartz-1 said:
Actually, it pretty much is. You boot to the Safe Mode command prompt and can disable the services from there.
Click to expand...

Booting into safe mode didn't help. I was unable to get services.msc or any other mmc panels to load due to the issues that were ongoing. Otherwise I wouldn't have needed to disable to services from outside the troubled windows install using another windows installation on another device. I literally had no use of control panel, the command prompt, or any management panels to work with inside of the windows installation.
 
Not plain safe mode with the GUI but safe mode with just the command prompt. It's another option on the F8 menu.
 
You can do a repair install on the win7 without wiping the laptop.

You'll need to install any crap software that messes with registry again after the repair install but that's it - all the files will remain as they are. Setting files of installed software etc. will remain in place unless they're again stupid enough to actually store settings in registry.

If your friend uses the laptop for general web browsing, e-mail, music etc. he might be best served by some linux distro instead. They're rock solid and practically have no danger of viruses.
 
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