How to customise the Services management console (services.msc)

For years I wanted to change the Services management console (services.msc) to start by default with the Standard tab - the Extended view is nice with the description and tasks on the left side, but it takes that space and I can simply run the tasks from the toolbar.

Here’s a very useful tip from Petri IT Knowledgebase website on how to “author” .msc files (had no idea you could do that) and change the default tab, columns and window sizes etc. I tried it on Windows 7 and I couldn’t overwrite the %WINDIR%\System32\services.msc for some reason (didn’t complain but I didn’t see the changes taking effect), but I could save it as a separate .msc file, which is good enough, I usually keep shortcuts on my desktop anyways…