Turning windows features on or off in windows xp

You may be surprised by what is running without your knowledge. On your system, these services may not all be turned on, or even installed. Whether a given service is installed and running may depend on whether you installed the system yourself, whether you are using XP Home or XP Professional, and from which vendor you got your computer if MS Windows XP was installed by a vendor.

Obviously, this is not a comprehensive list of everything running on your computer that you may want to turn off. It is merely a list of ten items that you most likely do not need to have running, and constitute a security vulnerability if left running. Most users will never have need of any of the services in this list, once the computer is up and running. Other services may be disabled without ill effect as well, though you should research each item in the complete services list before you disable it to ensure that you actually do not need it running.

Some of them are quite critical to the normal operation of your system, such as the Remote Procedure Call RPC service. Every running -- but unused -- service on your machine is an unnecessary security vulnerability. If a service is not important at all for authorized users and basic system functionality, turn it off. Chad Perrin is an IT consultant, developer, and freelance professional writer.

Remote Desktop Help Session Manager -- This service is used by the Remote Assistance feature that you can use to allow others remote access to the system to help you troubleshoot problems. Remote Registry -- The capabilities provided by the Remote Registry service are frightening to consider from a security perspective.

They allow remote users in theory, only under controlled circumstances to edit the Windows Registry. Some features are disabled by default. Windows Features can be enabled or disabled using command line. For checking the status of the features type the command mentioned above. In order to enable any feature, follow the steps below:.

Disabling Windows features is very similar to enabling them. Follow the steps below to disable any feature. You will get detailed information about the feature name, description, properties, status and whether it requires restart or not.

The benefit of PowerShell over using a command prompt is that PowerShell commands check if the feature is already enabled. If it is already enabled, the installation action is not performed saving computing time. To get information about windows features through Powershell, open PowerShell in administrative mode and then type.

If a feature is not available for installation in installed Windows, we will need to give external source address to install the feature. The external source can be Windows installation ISO or any drive. Make sure that the path should be given correctly and installation media should be correctly installed.

Moreover, you need to know exactly the feature name you wan to add. In XP, select Start, choose Run, type services. The window that comes up can seem intimidating. It lists a great many services nearly on my PC that various programs need to help them do their job.

The problem is that some of the services that are running in the background could just as well be sleeping. Double-click a service and up comes its Properties dialog box. Select Automatic, and it loads when Windows boots. Select Manual, and it loads when a program needs it. Turn off Tablet PC extras, part 2. Now comes the second part. I have my doubts. In Services, find and double-click ReadyBoost. If you almost never search for files, or if you use a third-party search tool like Copernic Desktop or Google Desktop , consider turning off search indexing.

Otherwise, leave it on. To turn it off, select Disabled. Windows reports errors back to Microsoft, in order to gain information for later bug fixes. This service helps Windows keep two or more users logged on and active at a time. After all, if you need help for an XP component, the last thing you want is to get an error message instead.

Find and double-click the service Offline Files. The features that you can disable here are the easiest ones to turn off—and switching them off is likely to yield the biggest improvements in performance, too. Turn off Aero in Vista, step 1.