Some interesting news coming out of Windows 7 development (which is on track for a Release Candidate – RC). The “Turn Windows Features On or Off” function has been greatly expanded. It even includes the ability to turn off Internet Explorer 8.
You can now turn of quite a few things in Windows 7 – the files are literally not loaded by the Windows 7 operating system. One of the developers sees this as a big benfit for “security-conscious customers”, but I’m thinking in terms of netbooks/ultraportables/mids/etc. where the resources are much more limited than on larger laptops/notebooks.
It is mentioned that even if you turn off a feature, that the data/binaries/software still exists on the drive. The benefit is that you don’t need a DVD to enable the feature, which is important to those with smaller devices which don’t have optical drives.
However, and it’s not quite addressed by any of the developers in the article, it doesn’t appear there is a way to remove the actual features, which might free up some space. As somebody in one of the follow-up comments mentioned, storage space is becoming less and less of an issue. Solid State Drives (SSD), where storage space is at a premium, have only been increasing in size while decreasing in cost. As I mentioned yesterday, you can easily get a netbook/ultraportable with a 16GB or 32GB SSD for under $400 USD.
Back in November, we mentioned that we were seeing Windows 7 take up 20GB in a fresh install. Chances are that the space requirements would come down by the time Windows 7 is released to manufacturing, since there was probably a lot of debug code and binaries that would be removed before RTM. By the time Windows 7 is released later this year, 32GB SSDs will probably be much cheaper and more widely available as an option in these devices.
From the MSDN blog: