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As an administrator, you’ll often have to start, stop, or pause Windows services. The related SC commands and their syntaxes are

Start a service:

sc start ServiceName

Pause a service:

sc pause ServiceName

Resume a paused service:

sc continue ServiceName

Stop a service:

sc stop ServiceName

where ServiceName in each case is the abbreviated name of the service you want to work with, such as

sc start w3svc

As with all SC commands, you can also specify the name of the remote computer whose services you want to work with. For example, to start the w3svc on MAILER1, you would use the following command:

sc \\Mailer1 start w3svc

The state listed in the results should show START_PENDING. With stop, pause, and continue you’ll see STOP_PENDING, PAUSE_PENDING, and CONTINUE_PENDING respectively as well. If an error results, the output states FAILED and error text is provided to describe the reason for the failure in more detail. If you are trying to start a service that is already started, you’ll see the error

An instance of the service is already running.

If you are trying to stop a service that is already stopped, you’ll see the error

The service has not been started.