You can use the
SC command for this purpose to manage services. It supports a wide range of operations on system services, but particularly useful for you question are
sc query and
sc stop. Use them like this:
To get a brief information about the service. Weather or not it's running will be displayed there.
This will stop the service, if possible. If it's wasn't running it will simply show an error message, but it doesn't does anything else, so issuing this one right away without querying will do no harm at all.
Just for completeness, this will, as the name suggest, start a service again.
Note that for starting and stopping services you need to have administrative privileges. Querying state can be done by plain users too. Also, the
<service name> you need to enter is each service internal name, NOT the display name shown in control panel. Look at the screenshot by
torchwood, where the properties dialog shows both.