Windows Vista: Turning Off Features

If you installed Windows Vista on your computer yourself, you may have noticed that you were not asked a lot of questions during the installation of the OS. Vista makes several assumptions about what it will and will not install for your computer.

It tries to install the applications and features that people will most often use. Although like anything that makes automatic assumptions for you it will never be 100% correct. If you find there is an application or functionality that you need or don't need you can add or remove it by using the 'Programs and Features' control panel.

Follow the instructions below to add or remove features from Vista:

• Under the Start menu open the Control Panel folder, then select the 'Programs and Features'.
• In the tasks pane on the left, click the 'Turn Windows features on or off' link.
• Check or uncheck the features you want to install or remove. Each feature has a checkbox next to it to indicate whether its installed or not. If you want to install a feature, just check it. If you want to uninstall an existing feature uncheck it. Some items have a '+' next to it, this indicates that there are sub-features that you can enable or disable.

When you uncheck a feature, this doesn't remove that feature from your computer, it only disables it so its not consuming system resources. You can also re-enable any feature you disabled by re-checking its checkbox.