Once upon a time, a article like this about adding and removing software programs would have required many tedious explanations and hard-to-follow directions. Count yourself lucky to be living in the 21st century. Microsoft has done a good job of making it easy to add and remove software as well as add and remove different parts of the Windows XP operating system. This short article explains precisely what to do. Installing and Removing Programs Windows XP includes a one-stop shopping point for adding and removing programs. To get to it, choose Start -> Control Panel -> Add or Remove Programs. You see the Add or Remove Programs dialog box. When Windows talks about changing programs, it isn’t talking about making minor twiddles this isn’t the place to go if you want Microsoft Word to stop showing you rulers, for example. Add or Remove Programs is designed to activate or deactivate big chunks of a program graft on a new arm or lop off an unused head (of which there are many, particularly in Office). If you can see the kind of grand scale I’m talking about: In Add or Remove Programs, you may tell Excel that you want to use its Analysis Pack for financial analysis. Similarly, you may use Add or Remove Programs to completely obliterate Office’s Speech Recognition capabilities. That’s the kind of large-scale capability I’m talking about.

Windows XP itself doesn’t do much in Add or Remove Programs. The main function of Windows is as a gathering point: Well-behaved programs, when they’re installed, are supposed to stick their uninstallers in Add or Remove Programs. That way, you have one centralized place to look when you want to get rid of a program. Microsoft doesn’t write the uninstallers that Add or Remove Programs runs; if you have a gripe about a program’s uninstaller, you need to talk to the company that made the program. Lessons from the School of Hard Knocks Several school-of-hard-knocks comments pertain to adding and removing programs:  -  In practice, you never use Add or Remove Programs to add programs. If you want to install a program, do what savvy Dummies always do: Put the CD in the CD drive and follow the instructions. It’s a whole lot easier that way.  -  You rarely use Add or Remove Programs to remove parts of a program. Either you try to add features in a program that you forgot to include when you originally installed the program most commonly with Office or you want to delete a program entirely, to wipe its sorry tail off your hard drive. Why sweat the small stuff? When you install a program, install all of it. Even Office XP, in all its bloated glory, only takes up 500MB if you install every single far-out filter and truculent template. With hard drives so cheap they’re likely candidates for landfill, it never pays to cut back on installed features to save a few megabytes.  -  Many uninstallers, for reasons known only to their company’s programmers I won’t mention Adobe by name require you to insert the program’s CD into your CD drive before you uninstall the program. That’s like requiring you to show your dog’s vaccination records before you kick it out of the house. When you start a program’s uninstaller, you’re at the mercy of the uninstaller and the programmers who wrote it. Windows doesn’t even enter into the picture. Installing and Removing Parts of Windows Most people never use big parts of Windows XP. Some parts are made with very specific functions in mind and, with two exceptions, the average Person on the Street rarely encounters the requisite specific situations.

Thank heaven. The two exceptions? Fax support and automatic backup in Windows. Neither gets installed unless you make the trek to retrieve it. Windows support for faxing has never been great. Although it’s theoretically possible for you to get the Windows fax application working, one great Achilles’ heel hampers you: If you have just one modem and it’s connected to the Internet, you can’t use it to send or receive faxes! Funny how Microsoft glosses over that detail, eh? The smartest Dummies I know don’t try to use Windows for faxing. Instead, they have a standalone fax machine (connected to its own telephone line, of course), or they use a fax service such as J2 Messenger (www.j2.com). J2’s software lets you send faxes as easily as you print: Choose File -> Print -> Send with J2 Messenger, and the program turns your fax into an e-mail message. When you send the message to J2 headquarters along with all your other e-mail it’s routed to a location close to the recipient, converted into a fax and then actually faxed for you, generally at a fraction of the cost for a longdistance phone call. J2 also offers inbound fax delivery: Your correspondent sends a fax to a specific phone number, the fax is converted to e-mail, and the e-mail is sent to you all within a matter of seconds. If the preceding caveat hasn’t warned you off, here’s how you install the Windows fax software. The same general procedure works for installing other obscure parts of Windows:

1. Choose Start -> Control Panel -> Add or Remove Programs to bring up Add or Remove Programs.

2. Click Add/Remove Windows Components to bring up the Windows Components Wizard.

3. Find the component that you want to add. In this case, because you’re trying to add fax support, select the Fax Services check box. In general, you may have to click on a likely sounding component, and then click the Details button to see which subcomponents are available.

4. Insert the Windows XP CD so that Windows can pull the component off the CD and install it on your PC. You may be required to restart Windows. In any case, by the time the wizard is done, your new component should be available and ready to use. If you performed a typical installation of Windows XP Home, the following list covers the components that you installed and have available:  -  All the Accessories and Utilities are installed.  -  Fax Services aren’t installed. Follow the instructions above to install Windows faxing, but make sure you understand the limitations.  -  Indexing Service is installed.  -  The only Management and Monitoring Tools available are for an obscure Internet network management standard called SNMP, or Simple Network Management Protocol. You can look up SNMP in the Windows Help and Support Center, but if you need to look it up, you probably don’t need it.  -  Internet Explorer and MSN Explorer are installed. You can get rid of them here, if you really want to. If you read the fine print, you’ll discover that Add/Remove Windows Components isn’t really offering to remove Internet Explorer. This option, ahem, “Adds or removes access to Internet Explorer from the Start menu and the Desktop.” In other words, you can get rid of the shortcut to IE from the Start menu (Windows XP, as it ships in plainvanilla systems, doesn’t have a shortcut to IE on the Desktop) using this option. Not exactly what you expected, eh?  -  Under Networking Services, you can add three subcomponents RIP Listener, which works with NetWare’s Router Information Protocol Version 1; Simple TCP/IP Services, an obscure group that includes Quote of the Day; and Universal Plug and Play support, which comes into question only if you have UPnP devices installed. (Confusingly, UPnP isn’t related to Plug ’n Play, the industry-wide standard for identifying hardware.)  -  Other Network File and Print Services includes support for only UNIX (and Linux) computers to print on printers connected to your PC.  -  The software to automatically Update Root Certificates (digital security certificates for Microsoft products) is installed and running. Maintaining Your Windows XP System Into every Windows XP’s life a little rain must fall. Or something like that. More than half a million people tested Windows XP: real people, not Microsoft internal “testers.” That’s the main reason why Windows XP has a well-deserved reputation for working pretty darn well on almost all computers.

Still, Windows XP is a computer program, not a Cracker Jack toy, and it’s going to have problems. The trick lies in making sure you don’t have problems, too. This article takes you through all of the important tools you have at hand to make Windows XP do what you need to do, to head off problems, and to solve problems as they (inevitably!) occur.