Well, I’ve finally completed my latest, time-saving program for developers. As usual, it started out as a small program that I used as a quick and dirty way to stop and start system services when writing, testing, and deploying code on different machines. I then realized that it might be useful to others who also are constantly opening up the Services console under Windows.

System Manager runs as a system tray application and provides a simple customizable menu for starting and stopping system services. In addition, I added a Group feature where you can build a list of services that need to be started/stopped. This can be a huge time-saver. I use it quite a bit. I often need to switch between running ColdFusion 5/MSSQL and JBoss/CF7/MySQL on my machine, and in the original version, I got tired of having to click the menu 5 whole times (god developers are lazy)! So now I just create a two Groups – one that starts CF5 services and one that starts CF7 services – and with two clicks, I’m off an running.

Visit System Manager Home Page for screenshots, installation video and download.