Top 5 Worst and Useless Features and Programs in Windows Vista
Microsoft has added lots of new features, functions and programs into Windows Vista in order to make it a better operating system. There is best top new features in Vista, and certainly there is also useless and unwanted features and functions that if removed from Vista, will in fact make the OS perfect.
Of course, everybody will have different opinions on what’s the most useless and unwanted Vista features. And sometimes, a top feature rated by a person will probably rated as worst by another person or vice versa. Here’s a list of top 5 worst, unneeded and unwanted programs and features in Windows Vista. If you have a different opinions (probably will), post in comments.
- User Account Control - A noble initiative to tighten security in Windows Vista to reduce automatic installation and infection by malicious software. But for novice users bombarded with “Windows needs your permission to continue” UAC warning prompt everyday, they won’t care to read will click “Continue” to grant elevated privileges most of the time. If you equally find UAC annoying, here’s how to disable and turn off UAC.
- SuperFetch - Microsoft hopes to speed up program launching waiting time by preloading and caching programs’ code into system physical memory, which has considerably faster read-write access speed. Definitely gone is large amount of memory used by SuperFetch, but the result of performance improvement is not necessary coming. Try to turn off and disable SuperFetch and benchmark the performance, you may be better off leaving SuperFetch off.
- Remote Differential Compression - A technology to minimize amount of data transferred across network by using compression. However, with the popularity of higher and higher speed broadband and Gigabits network, the benefit is probably much outweigh by the problem the RDC may bring, i.e. slow files copy and move operation.
- Windows Defender - Without question, Windows Defender is much improved and will be further improved by the days. However, probably a lot of users already depend on much reliable and much user friendly third party anti-spyware such as Spyware Doctor and etc, and do not need another anti-spyware software in the system in duplication. Furthermore, most user will need free anti-virus program, unfortunately Windows Defender is not one. Here’s the guide to disable and uninstall Windows Defender.
- Windows Media Center (WMC/MCE) - If you’re not turning the computer into an entertainment center to view TV channels and play DVD movies, Media Center is probably useless. To get rid of MCE, try guide on how to disable and remove MCE.
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Entries (RSS)
April 25th, 2008 11:25
Some of these features may be useless to the home user, but have great value to the business world.
April 25th, 2008 11:41
These applications are hardly useless.
UAC was designed and implemented to annoy people so that program writers would stop coding programs to use administrative privileges.
In any work environment, superfetch is a valuable tool for saving load times, so games irregular tasks be damned.
gigabit Ethernet maybe popular and widely implemented, but why waste valuable bandwidth, consider offices with many terminals. Imagine the congestion you could prevent in peak hours.
Many home users never pay attention to security, defender is a free and basic default, which is excellent for bringing this issue to the table, and at least have the user think about their computer’s safety.
and WMC is nice, I mean, it’s not perfect, but it’s userfriendly and shiney. not everyone knows about foobar and VLC you know. Also: Blueray/ HD… yeah…
August 17th, 2008 23:01
I agree, these applications are hardly useless.
UAC is!
Superfetch is valuable, because it saves load times, which save you time.
Windows Defender is great (yes it’s basic) but it’s free, and home users wont have to worry about getting another Anti-Spyware program.
WMC is nice, not perfect, but it’s user-friendly. It’s improving, and maybe it will be even better with SP2!
August 26th, 2008 01:08
Well, I agree these feature’s are neither unwanted nor useless, but perhaps not in place for some people. One really sucking feature which I discovered recently is the option do remove the menubar by double-clicking the panel of the task-manager. This is very disturbing, when happened by mistake.
October 18th, 2008 08:38
For the most part, I disagree with most of this list. Readers beware - following these instructions blindly is likely a disastrous move for your computer.
SUPERFETCH: The recommendation to disable SuperFetch is terrible. SF virtually always provides a performance boost on people’s computers when it comes to running commonly executed application. If memory is limited, Vista auto-throttles SuperFetch’s usage/memory consumption so there’s no need to futz with it… ever.
RDC: The recommendation to disable Remote Differential Compression is terrible. RDC, particularly for home Internet connections or limited bandwidth WAN conections make use of this feature. This is not the infamous TCP autosizing issue - you will virtually never slow your connection down using RDC except in very small file transmissions over very short sessions.
DEFENDER: There’s nothing wrong with keeping Defender running while you have a 3rd party anti-virus product running. AV != Active-AntiSpyware. Anyone that believes that their AV product alone will protect them from Spyware is ignorant. Anyone that believes that a scan-based anti-spyware product is superior to Defender needs to get their head examined. Defender is a great compliment to a layered security approach to malware.
As for User Access Control & Windows Media Center, I’m not going to argue those points because for some people (experts, folks using other TiVO like software) these technologies may be a complete waste of bits & cycles whereas for others it may be very necessary.
(Non-techies, folks without TiVos)
October 30th, 2008 11:09
OK, so many users think that the list is not useful. I am numbered amongst the ‘non-techies’ and am so fed-up with Vista’s poor performance that I prefer to use my 9 year-old laptop running XP to my new $2000 Vista model. What can I do to make it run as well as a laptop with an 1/8 the RAM and 1/4 the processor speed. I’m crippled by this vista rubbish. Please help by posting ways to make it run at a reasonable speed
October 30th, 2008 11:35
Protip for Vista performance: “non-techies” Seem to just not know how.
Have fun with your XP guys. I’ll just continue on using my “ULTRA ADVANCED SUPER-COMPLEXZORES” vista. It’s a wonder some people manage to use the internet with any degree of success. I bet they use IE…
*Brace for flame war!!!*