Easily View Windows’ Optional Features, and Turn Them On and Off

Windows 10 doesn’t offer a way to manage these features from the new Settings application. You’ll have to use the old Windows Features dialog, available in the Control Panel, to manage features.

From this Windows Features dialog, you can enable features like Microsoft’s Hyper-V virtualization tool, the Internet Information Services (IIS) web server and other servers, and the Window s Subsystem for Linux. You can also remove access to some default features–for example, you could disable Internet Explorer to hide that legacy web browser from Windows 10. The exact features available to you here depend on the edition of Windows 10 you’re using.

To launch the Control Panel, right-click the Start button or press Windows+X on your keyboard, then select “Control Panel” from the menu that pops up.

Click “Programs” in the list and then select “Turn Windows features on or off” under Programs and Features.

You can also quickly launch this window with a single command. To do so, open the Start menu, type “optionalfeatures”, and press Enter. You can also press Windows Key + R to open the Run dialog, type “optionalfeatures”, and press Enter.

The list of available Windows features appears. If a feature has a checkmark next to it, it’s enabled. If a feature doesn’t have a checkmark, it’s disabled.

If you see a square in a box, the feature contains multiple sub-features and only some of them are enabled. You can expand the feature to see which of its subfeatures are and aren’t enabled.

Click “OK” and Windows will apply whatever changes you made. Depending on the features you enabled or disabled, Windows may require you reboot your computer for the changes to take effect.

You can do this entirely offline and without any Internet connection. The features are stored on your computer and aren’t downloaded when you enable them.