Mar 09 2009
Windows 7 - Your Choice Your Control
The theme of “choice and control” has been applied in many aspects of how we have designed Windows 7. We’ve certainly received lots of positive feedback about the theme and about the choices we’ve made in the design, and we’ve also received a few suggestions for how we might continue to implement this theme in the future. We’ve received feedback for features that should be even more customizable (such as Explorer or the logon screen) or features that should be added to Windows (such as a PDF format reader, security tools, or disk utilities). And we’ve received feedback that some users might prefer to run Windows without certain features. This post is about a point of choice and control in the Windows 7 control panel called “Windows Features” which is where you can choose to turn various features of Windows on or off. This continues our discussion of changes we have made based on feedback from the Beta as we progress to the Release Candidate. This post is by Jack Mayo who is the group program manager for our Documents and Printing team and also worked on Internet Explorer 8.
The above quote you read is from Microsoft Blog Published Yesterday informing users about the disabling/enabling feature of the Windows 7 operating system. With the release candidate for Windows 7 they have provided users with a option to choose On or Off several features like Windows Media Player, Windows Media Center, Windows DVD Maker, Internet Explorer 8, Windows Search, Handwriting Recognition (through the Tablet PC Components option), Windows Gadget Platform, Fax and Scan, XPS Viewer and Services (including the Virtual Print Driver) and many many more. With the earlier version if any one has to remove any of these feature there API’s should also have to be remove as well but with this release the files required by any disabled feature will be dumped without their binaries and data loaded into the operating system. This means when a user need to add that feature in the future he does not have to look for installation CD.
This was stated at the Microsoft Blog as ” 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. These same files are staged so that the features can easily be added back to the running OS without additional media. This staging is important feedback we have received from customers who definitely do not like to dig up the installation DVD.”
In this successor release of Windows Vista this feature is available with in the extended control panel called “Windows Features” from standard “Programs and Features” control panel earlier known as Add/Remove Programs.
Now as it clearly shows that any one can easily set the feature he wants rather then all the features to be loaded at all. But what it seem that is missing that what if any one doesn’t want to remove a feature at all and don;t want that there files should be staged any where causing up the space. There should be an option like “I never ever ever want this feature, do not even put it on my hard drive” What do you think?
If you want to read the full post by Microsoft Click at the Link Below
Engineering Windows 7
