Gone with the wind

Let’s begin with what features are no longer a part of the operating system. Movie Maker, Windows Calendar, Windows Mail, and Windows Photo Gallery are gone. However, they can be installed or run from Windows Live. As you know, Mail, Photos, and Calendar are already an active part of Windows Live and have been for a while. Movie Maker is the new addition, and it is now available as a beta on the Windows Live site (http://download.live.com/moviemaker).


Turning off Windows features
As you know, the ability to disable certain features in Windows has been a part of the operating system for a long time. For example, the Windows XP Add/Remove Programs utility contained the Windows Components Wizard, which gave you the ability to remove a very limited number of components from the operating system.

In Windows Vista, the utility was renamed Windows Features and the user interface was streamlined with a single tree structure. And while it allowed you to disable more than XP (mainly because it had more optional features) it still did not allow you to remove features that Microsoft considered main features of the operating system.

In Windows 7, the Windows Features does allow you to remove several of those main features. And, as you can see in Figure A, the real stunner here is that you can now turn off Internet Explorer.

Figure A

If you would rather use Firefox or Chrome as your main Web browser, you can just clear the Internet Explorer 8 check box to turn it off. And that’s just the beginning!

If you would rather use Nero to burn your DVDs, you can clear the Windows DVD Maker check box. If you don’t have a need for Windows Media Center, you can turn it off. If you prefer iTunes, disable Windows Media Player.

Hate Gadgets? Just clear the Windows Gadget Platform check box and never see them again. Want Google Desktop Search instead? Remove Windows Search. Standardized on the PDF format? Clear the XPS check boxes.

Wow! You really now have a choice!

What does turning off really mean?

As you can imagine, turning off is not the same as uninstalling. And, since the feature must be installed in order for you to be able to turn it off, this is not the same as picking and choosing during Setup. According to Microsoft’s Engineering Windows 7 Blog:

“If a feature is deselected, it is not available for use. This means the files (binaries and data) are not loaded by the operating system (for security-conscious customers) and not available to users on the computer.”

They further back up the advantage of turning off an installed feature as opposed to uninstalling it with:

“These same files are staged so that the features can easily be added back to the running OS without additional media.”
Some applets remain

Oh, I almost forgot… While you can turn off more than you would have imagined in Windows 7, Notepad, WordPad, Calculator, and Paint are not among the features you can turn off and will stay where they are. At least three of the four have new features and new interface designs.