grayed out services in Windows 10

Hello All,

I found the I was able to use regedit to disable dnscache.

I will say that it is ridiculous to lose the ability to change this from the services control panel. I also tried disabling it using msconfig and even unchecking the box didn't disable it. 

Here are the directions the finally worked.

win+x run regedit

Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\Dnscache and

locate Start registry key

Change Startup type :

Automatic -2

Manual -3

Disabled -4

Automatic (Delayed Start) -2

I found the directions for changing this registry value at this link

https://computerstepbystep.com/dns\_client\_service.html

There are nice screen shots provided on their webpage.

The webpage and screen shots are for windows 7 however the directions for editing the registry  worked for Windows 10.

Meliton,

This is a new issue. As the opening thread stated, even in previous versions of Windows 10 (1607) this used to work -- I just verified this. However, in 1709 the service is greyed out, and you can not control it from services.msc or by using "net stop dnscache" / "net start dnscache" which is a common operation in troubleshooting and just testing changes to DNS.

As a network/system/dns administrator of 15+ years, I feel I have a relatively good idea of what this service does, and how it has been operated in the past. "By design" we used to be able to do this as administrators, and personally is an important task in my day to day job. You will find numerous articles explaining how to restart the service, and why you might want to. I have enough road blocks in resolving issues without Microsoft arbitrarily deciding to disable control of the DNS caching service. And until an explanation can be given, from my perspective it is arbitrary and unnecessary from Microsoft's/Window's position. In particular in this case we have a production server that is obtaining an IPv6 tunnel address (which doesn't work) and registering it in DNS. Since IPv6 is preferred over IPv4 by default, the first thing systems do when trying to reach the service is timeout and then revert to IPv4. Simply running "ipconfig /flushdns" as administrator is not enough to clear the discovered IPv4 preference for the particular host. It would be nice to have a consistent way to test if this is happening or not with a simple ping command, after disabling IPv6 on the server and cleaning up DNS after business hours (which is a necessity since they're production servers). This change is not wanted, acceptable, or as far as I can tell, necessary in any way.

-Matt P.

Hi Mayra, I installed Windows 10 Pro and still having the same issue. I connected to internet and installed all windows updates and still the issue is there. I created a new Admin account as you suggested and that account has the same issue.

While these 3 services are useful, I don't believe they are critical for running Windows. I want to run least number of services necessary (for security considerations) and have read recommendations to disable these services for such setups.

Thanks!

P.S. on a side note, I went through your links as well as other microsoft ones on these services:

• DNS Client it seems is used to cache DNS entries - so disabling it may lead to slow downs in page loading but not much more then that in "regular" configurations using only TCP/IP (no netbios or multiple networks involved here). To quote one source, this service is a "target of attacks which poisons the cache with fake DNS entries" sometimes.
• WinHTTP Proxy is useful when behind corporate firewall for web proxy but not so much for home setup it seems.
• Xbox Game Monitoring ... well, I don't even have an XBox...

DNS Client does more than cache DNS records, it gets them in the 1st place so disabling it limits internet access.

Xbox code is used in a number of places, the most obvious being the Tile based menus. On balance there should be no reason to prevent it being disabled but Microsoft have blocked a number of things for "user experience" reasons but if the condition has changed with updates then presumably something will hang off that service.

Hello Justin,

Disabling Windows services should only be done if you are familiar with the function of each services that you will modify.

The reason why you are unable to disable the DNS Client, and WinHTTP Web Proxy Auto Discovery services is because it is by design that even the administrator will not be able to change its configuration.

You may check this similar thread with a workaround regarding your concern. Please refer to the answer of the user named No.Compromise on September 10, 2009. Also, be advised that it requires a third-party tool to have this accomplished.

Feel free to let us know if it works for you.