Remove parts of Windows
Control Panel / Programs and Features / Turn Windows features on or off [upper left panel of window] → Windows Features dialog.
Toggle to your heart’s content, but note that since Win 7, and particularly Win 8, there is not much difference in whether they are uninstalled or not, but you might disable some services that you may come to rely upon, as an OS full of objects and services has quite a hierarchy of dependencies.
Remove indexing
While one could just disable the indexing service, I vaguely remember that because of its dependencies, I was not willing to do that.
However, to stop indexing on all drives:
- Open Windows Explorer.
- Right click on a local drive and select the Properties option to open its Properties dialog.
- Uncheck the ‘Allow files on this drive to have contents indexed … … properties’ at the bottom, and click the OK button to open the ‘Confirm Attribute Changes’ dialog.
- Select the ‘Apply changes to drive X:, subfolders and files’ option, and click the OK button.
- If the Access Denied dialog appears, if required enter login details for an admin account, then click the Continue button. The Applying Attributes, then the Processing dialogs appear, leaving the indexing updated without further indication.
- Repeat steps 2 to 5 for each drive.
I habitually turn off indexing as the number of times I have ever searched is very low, though the newer OS philosophy is to keep your stuff as disorganised as you like, and it will index it all for your queries at the Start screen. Well, a DAW would end up in a mess if left to the ‘wherever’ philosophy, so I turn it off. With all SSDs, searches without indexing are pretty quick (and silent!).