Weather Imagery

I don’t like things installed or running on my computer if I don’t use them or they are not needed. You just never know what it’s recording, remembering and sending out to the rest of the world.

One such thing I’ve encountered was an icon within my Network Connections in Windows XP home edition. It was titled Local Area Connection on Linux and strangely, I couldn’t delete it or disable it! After Googling around, I found out it can actually mess up your broadband connection or at least make it less efficient. So I wanted to get rid of it, which turned out to be a bit non-intuitive but nonetheless, easy and harmless.

1. Start => Control Panel => Add or Remove Programs
2. On the left, click “Add/Remove Windows Components”
3. Scroll down to Networking Components and select it (don’t uncheck it)
4. Click the Details button in the lower right corner
5. Un-check the “Internet Gateway Device Discovery and Control Client
6. Click OK

The computer will then need to be rebooted for the changes to take affect. Once rebooted, the “feature” will be removed.