Media Center and Player added to Windows 7 kill list

 

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By Barry Collins

Posted on 6 Mar 2009 at 17:35

Microsoft will allow Windows 7 users to switch off features such as Media Center and Windows Media Player, as well as Internet Explorer, the company has revealed.

It was revealed earlier this week that leaked betas of Windows 7 allowed users to switch off Internet Explorer 8.

The move was interpreted as a sop to the European Union, which has charged Microsoft with abusing its monopoly position by bundling the browser with Windows.

Now the company has revealed that Media Center, Windows Media Player and Windows Search will join IE8 on an extended list of apps that can be switched off in the Windows 7 Release Candidate. None of these appear on the list in the current beta, build 7000, which is accessible from the Turn Windows Features On or Off menu in the Control Panel.

However, switching off a feature won't remove it permanently from the operating system. "We've already seen one decision which is to make sure we keep the features staged for future use so that a DVD is not required," group program manager, Joe Mayo, writes on the Engineering Windows 7 blog.

"A second decision is that we also continue to support the APIs available for features where these APIs are necessary to the functionality of Windows or where there are APIs that are used by developers that can be viewed as independent of the component.

"As many of you know these are often referred to as 'dependencies' and with Windows the dependencies can run both internal to Windows and external for ISVs."

Microsoft's also ruled out the possibility of giving people the choice of which apps to turn on/off at the point of installation.

"We know some have suggested that this set of choices be a 'setup option', Mayo writes. "Some operating systems do provide this type of setup experience. As we balanced feedback, the vast majority of feedback we have received was to streamline setup and to reduce the amount of potential complexity in getting a PC running.

"We chose to focus this feature on the post-setup experience for Windows 7."