Turn Windows features on and off

Here’s a handy, little-known Windows 7 dialog box that's good to learn about. If you do a desktop search on the words “Turn windows features,” you’ll get to a dialog box entitled Turn Windows features on or off, which consists of a bunch of check boxes to govern some Windows items you may never have seen before. So, for instance, you can select exactly which Windows-standard games you want to see in the Start menu, if any. Or you can enable esoteric features such as the Windows TIFF iFilter, which lets you search and index TIFF images via optical character recognition.
 

 
Most of these options are for more advanced users (such as messing around with Microsoft’s .NET Framework or TCP/IP services), but if you’re an IT guy at heart, this is a good way to explore your new operating system and see what Windows has to offer. More casual users can also find tweaks here, too, such as which Windows media applications (such as Media Player or Media Center) to enable or disable.
You can also disable Internet Explorer 8 here, in case you want to install an earlier version of the browser. And one thing we noticed: To reduce a little sliver of system overhead, you can disable the Tablet PC Components category if you don’t have a computer capable of touch input or handwriting recognition. (On our test systems, it was on by default.)