Disable useless Vista Features

Lose What You Don't Need
If you installed Vista yourself and have experience installing previous Windows OSes, you surely noticed that Vista hardly asks any questions about your computer—and what you plan to do with it—than did prior OSes. Windows Vista makes all kinds of assumptions about your computing habits and the features you may or may not need, and it inevitably installs some overhead that you simply don't need. You can get rid of it. Windows XP had the Add/Remove Windows Features button in the Control Panel Add/Remove Programs applet, and Vista has something like it.

1. Open Control Panel and click Uninstall a Program to launch Vista's Uninstall or Change a Program Window. In the Tasks pane on the left, click Turn Windows Features On or Off.
2. Check the list of features. Each feature is preceded by a checkbox which, if filled, indicates the feature is installed. If you hover the mouse over a feature, a help tooltip appears to tell you what it is.

   Do you really need Windows Meeting Space or Tablet PC components?

3. Uncheck any feature you don't need. Some of the features are headings with a sub-list below them; just click the little + sign to expand.

For my gaming system, I've purged everything except:

• Some of the games
• XPS Viewer (under .NET Framework 3.0)
• Remote Differential Compression (a network optimizer)
• Windows Ultimate Extras

Note that when you uncheck features, you're not removing these features from your system; you're simply turning them off so they don't sit in the background eating up resources. You can turn any of them back on by invoking this window and filling the checkboxes.