Uninstall More Windows Components

If you are trying to clean up Windows to speed up your PC, you are probably also uninstalling windows programs. Using the control panel you can uninstall software. Both 3^rd party applications and Windows components can be uninstalled.

So how can you clean up your PC even more? Well, not all Windows components are shown in the uninstall program list. So that means you can not really uninstall them, even though you might never use them. Some programs might not be used at all and for others you might have very good 3^rd party alternatives.

So if you do want to clean up your computer beyond what you think is possible, follow the following steps to uninstall more Windows components:

1. Open the Windows Explorer, and browse to the Windows\inf folder on your system disk (mostly C:\Windows\inf).
   Note that this is a hidden folder, so make sure you have the show hidden folders option enabled.
2. Right-click the file called sysoc.inf in the folder, and in the popup menu click Open With and select notepad.exe to open the file.
3. In the file, look up the section [Components].

4. The [Components] section contains a list of Windows components that can be uninstalled. The Windows components that are not shown in the Control Panel are the ones that have the word “hide” in the line. Simply remove the word from the line to ensure the Windows component can be uninstalled.
5. Save the file and Exit the notepad application.
6. Now open the Software section in the Control Panel again and you will see the extra Windows components to uninstall.

Using this method you can clean up your PC beyond what is possible by default, freeing up valuable disk space to make your computer faster.