Free utilities make Windows smaller, faster

By Fred Langa Microsoft keeps building more and more into Windows, but sometimes all you want or need is a bare-bones, minimal OS. If small and fast is what you want, several free programs let you remove unnecessary Windows components to improve your system’s performance and reliability.

Put your Windows installation on a diet

John Casey is looking for a way to streamline his Windows installation by uninstalling the components he doesn’t need:

• “Have you written articles about which components of Windows are safe to uninstall? I’m already a Firefox/Thunderbird user and I want to migrate to OpenOffice. Can I safely remove IE 8, the .NET Framework, etc.? I’m not a developer, I just use SAAS business applications.”
  

Many components and tools bundled with Windows can indeed be removed. There are two basic approaches. One technique involves removing Windows components by hand. The second and better of the two techniques takes a little doing but results in a fresh, stable, known-good minimal installation.

In fact, the second of the two approaches uses the same basic technology that OEMs use to produce their customized installations of Windows. (Of course, OEMs are more apt to put extra stuff in rather than take anything out!) This is also the same technology used to produce a “live CD” — a self-contained, bootable CD and repair-disk version of Windows.

1. Perfectly good technique

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