How to Launch It
- Open the traditional Control Panel through the Start Screen or using the Run Windows command “control”.
- Select “Category” view for Control Panel.
- Select “Programs” category. This opens a new page containing the subcategories.
- Select “Programs and Features”. This will launch the applet on the same page of Control Panel.
Installed programs
The main page of the applet shows a list of all the installed traditional programs along with the details like the creator, installed date, size (if available) and version of an installed program. To modify a program installation, right click on it and select one of the provided options. Alternatively, select the desired program and click on the options provided on the top of the list. You can do one of the following operations.- Change a program – Several programs are divided into components. For example, Microsoft Office has components like Word, PowerPoint, Excel, OneNote, etc. You can install or remove these components individually using this option.
- Repair a program – An installed program might get damaged if some of its critical files or configuration gets deleted or corrupted by accident. This option lets you repair such a program and restore it to its default settings.
- Uninstall a program – This will remove the program and most of its settings from the system.
Installed updates
Windows regularly installs online updates to keep the system stable, up to date and resilient from malware.
This applet also lists these updates. Click on “View installed updates” link located at the left pane of the main page of this applet.
The resulting page lists all the updates that Windows has installed till date. You can remove any of those updates from the list if desired.
That is not recommendable, however, since most updates are important for the stability of the system. It will help if you know what you are doing while removing any update.
Windows Features
Windows contains certain features that are turned off by default as they are not used by most of the users. These and other features can be turned on/off from this applet.
Click “Turn Windows features on or off” link on the left pane of the main page of the applet. This will launch a window listing all the extra Windows features.
Here’s a list of some of the Windows features below.
- Windows Search is an optional feature that you may turn on/off.
- If you don’t have a printer, then you might want to turn off the feature of printer services.
- If you use another media program, then you could turn off Windows Media Player. Similarly, you can turn off Internet Explorer if you don’t need it. Both these programs will become inaccessible, then, unless you turn them on again.
- The IIS server is turned off by default. You can turn if on here if you want to serve webpages on internet.
