Turning on/off windows features in control panel

When a box is blue that means not all of the subfolders are checked. To view the subfolders, click the + next to a folder.



You can turn any of the listed features on or off - but you will not be able to use a feature while it's turned off. Unless you need to turn a feature on or off, the settings can be left as they are.

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/Turn-Windows-features-on-or-off

You can customize your Windows installation even more.

What can you remove?

• Internet Explorer 8
• Windows Media Player
• Windows Media Center
• Windows DVD Maker
• Windows Search
• Handwriting Recognition (through the Tablet PC Components option)
• Windows Gadget Platform
• Fax and Scan
• XPS Viewer and Services (including the Virtual Print Driver)

Microsoft does note there are consequences for removing certain features since third party programs and other Windows Features may have certain requirements or dependencies on functionality built into these critical components.

Application Dependencies are still a factor when removing features like Internet Explorer or Windows Search.

“It is worth describing the details of remove” since this too is a place where there are engineering and customer decisions to be made. We’ve already seen one decision which is to make sure we keep the features staged for future use so that a DVD is not required. A second decision is that we also continue to support the APIs available for features where these APIs are necessary to the functionality of Windows or where there are APIs that are used by developers that can be viewed as independent of the component. As many of you know these are often referred to as dependencies” and with Windows the dependencies can run both internal to Windows and external for ISVs.”

Windows Team member, Jack Mayo