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To restart Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), restart the Windows service named winmgmt from an elevated Command Prompt or PowerShell session. The commands are simple, but stopping WMI also stops services that depend on it, and those services may need to be started separately.

Restart WMI from Command Prompt

Open Command Prompt with administrator rights, then run these commands in order:

  1. net stop winmgmt
  2. net start winmgmt

When Windows asks whether to stop dependent services, review the prompt before confirming. Stopping WMI also stops dependent services; Microsoft gives SMS Agent Host and Windows Firewall as examples. Those services do not automatically restart when WMI starts again. The exact dependencies vary by Windows version. See Microsoft’s Starting and stopping the WMI service documentation.

Restart WMI from PowerShell

Open PowerShell with administrator rights and run:

Restart-Service -Name winmgmt

Microsoft documents this cmdlet for restarting WMI. If the service is already stopped, Restart-Service starts it without reporting an error. The same dependent-service warning applies as with the Command Prompt method.

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Check services that stopped with WMI

If you confirmed that Windows should stop dependent services, check whether any affected service needs to be started after WMI is running. Start only services relevant to your system and the problem you are troubleshooting; the dependency list is not identical on every Windows version.

A restart is not a WMI repository repair

Restarting winmgmt stops and starts the service. It does not check or repair the WMI repository. Microsoft documents these separate commands:

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Use repository operations only when you have diagnosed a repository problem and are following Microsoft’s documented procedures for the winmgmt utility. Do not delete the repository as an initial troubleshooting step: Microsoft warns that doing so can damage Windows or installed applications.

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When restarting WMI may not solve the problem

WMI normally starts automatically with Windows and can also start when a management application or script first requests a connection to a WMI namespace. If one application is failing, identify the specific symptom and check the affected application and services rather than repeatedly restarting WMI. A restart alone does not diagnose the cause.

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