Introduction

Let’s say you have a service in Windows Vista that stops or crashes for whatever reason from time to time. Windows Vista can be setup to respond (recover) a service that’s crashed automatically for you instead of you having to manually restart the service or computer.

This guide walks you through setting up a few simple responses to a failed service in Windows Vista.

Setup a Failed Service Response

1. Type Service in the search box in the Start Menu.
2. Select Services in the search results.

   Note: If your user account doesn’t have administrative privileges right-click Services and select Run as administrator.

3. Double-click the service you want to setup a recovery response for.
4. Select the Recovery tab.
5. Select to Take no action, Restart the service, Run a program (.exe, .com, .cmd, or .bat files only), or Restart the computer next to the first, second, and subsequent failures.

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Note: If you choose to run a program you need to insert the location of the program to run in the Run Program section.

Note: If a service is set to restart the computer if it fails the computer can be set to notify everyone on its network it’s about to restart. This comes in handy for notifying IT personnel of the failure and users of a service running on a server that’s about to restart.

You can setup the restart notification by clicking the Restart computer options button. Check off Before restart, send this message to computers on the network and type your message in the box.