Turn Windows Features on or off, why? Well one reason would be that you want the
drive space for some other programs. Another is why have games taking up drive
space, processor, and memory when you never use them?
Now how do programs you don't use take up processor and memory? All data, be
that a program or the data a program produces is stored in an Index, this is a
data base. (Has been since NT 3 came out in the 90's). This index resides
partially in physical memory and partially in your Paging or Swap file where it
can be brought in to memory say when you do a search for a file or open the
Windows Explorer - the Libraries.
By reducing the number of programs that you do not use you lower the size of
the index. Over time this index will grow to be quite large. You will notice a
marked difference between a computer that just had the Operating System
installed and one that the OS had been on the hard drive for sometime.
This article is about features and programs only, not security settings of
your computer.
This article applies to both the 32 Bit and 64 Bit versions.
How do you set the control panel
to show all the items instead of hunting for the item you want to change?
First you go to the top right
hand side of the control panel, click on view category then select small
or large icons from the menu
Now you have a list of all the
control panel items, small icons will display in a smaller area and reduce
scrolling.
On the left pane you can add and
remove the default Windows programs and features. Click on the 'Turn
Windows features on or off' and the installer program will load.
The list of programs or
features, to remove one, clear the check box, to add an additional program
check the open box.
You can expand the main category
by clicking on the + and then add or remove the subcategories.
Once you have selected or
deselected you items click on the ok button or cancel if you change your
mind.
The Windows Installer will add
or remove the programs.
Memory usage before removing the programs was 449 Meg.
Next I open up the gpedit.msc,
there are some things that I would like the OS stop doing, such as
Autoplay, the biggest reason for turning off Autoplay is that it is a
security risk, another is the pop up is annoying. I haven't counted the
GPO's in Windows 7 yet, but by expanding the listing I can see there are a
lot more than those that came with say XP.
through the subcategories you can see them all here, nice
feature. So you just scroll down to the setting you want to enable,
disable or set as 'Not Configured'. A warring about GPO's - Setting a GPO
to enabled or disabled may have side effects, that is a service may rely
on one or more items that the GPO is for. Read the description of the GPO,
read it twice, MS words things in a way that what you think you are doing
is the opposite in some cases.
After removing programs and
setting some of the GPO's to disabled the memory usage is down to 369 Meg,
it will be lower when the excessive services are turned off, should be
around 270 meg.
Not bad considering it was at 580+ Meg when I started.
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