Can I disable the some features of Dreamweaver to make it lighter?

Question

Dreamweaver gives a lot of options, like a Live preview, split the live preview and codes, and many others options in the footer, and sidebar sections.

Can I disable it's some features to increase its performance?

Answer 1

Sadly you cannot disable whole "sections/modules" of the program there are however quite a few things you can do before you just replace it with Notepad++ ;)

I found a comprehensive list here http://sniptools.com/vault/speed-up-dreamweaver-mx-some-performance-boosting-tips, some of these look really useful:

1. First and fore­most, if you are on Win­dows, espe­cially XP and 2000, then get the lat­est ser­vice packs from Win­dows Update, and most impor­tantly, the MSXML SP4 update. This will imme­di­ately improve your system's per­for­mance. (Has worked for sev­eral peo­ple I know.)
2. Make sure real-time virus pro­tec­tion is off in the DW folder. Most virus pro­tec­tion pro­grams allow you to exclude a folder when doing virus check­ing. You should exclude the Dreamweaver folder from your virus pro­tec­tion. Dreamweaver is con­stantly load­ing and exe­cut­ing HTML and JavaScript­files while you are work­ing. Each file is scanned if you have virus pro­tec­tion on. If you are wor­ried about viruses in this folder, you can run a scan on the folder when you aren't work­ing with Dreamweaver. Be sure to also include sub­fold­ers. This should give you a notice­able speed improvement.
3. When the Dreamweaver Appli­ca­tion win­dow is open (par­tic­u­larly with the Data­bases or Com­po­nent tab selected) Dreamweaver will keep refresh­ing win­dow con­tent. This can have a real impact on Dreamweaver per­for­mance, and so it is best to keep the Appli­ca­tion win­dow closed when it is not being used.
4. Right-click > Close Panel Group on any panel that you don't use. Most of them don't take up any pro­cess­ing time, but some of them do, and if you don't use them, you shouldn't be penal­ized for it.
5. If you want to elim­i­nate some of the drag (but lose server behav­iors func­tion­al­ity), you can go into Con­fig­u­ra­tion > Server­Be­hav­iors> [your server model] and rename the folder to some­thing else (like Cold­Fu­sionOLD) and then cre­ate a new blank folder (Cold­Fu­sion). DW will respond a lit­tle quicker with no server behav­iors to worry about. Your Server Behav­iors menu will be empty, but DW will not have to read your doc­u­ment every time you make an edit to re-populate the Server Behav­iors panel. Alter­na­tively you can rename the old folder and cre­ate your own new folder and copy only the server behav­iors that you need — the HTML, EDML, and JS files for each server behavior.
6. The same trick will work for the Behav­iors panel as well. Go into the Behav­iors > Actions folder and remove HTML files of Behav­iors that you will never use.
7. Don't install a lot of exten­sions that you aren't going to use. Each exten­sion copos­si­bly eat up valu­able pro­cess­ing time. Only some exten­sions cause slow­downs, but if it is some­thing that you aren't going to use, don't take the chance. Also, exten­sions cause the load time of the pro­gram to be increased.
8. Another way to speed up response time is to go into Pref­er­ences > Invis­i­ble Ele­ments and set up the Show Dynamic Text As {}. You can also uncheck the hid­den ele­ments so they aren't ren­dered either.
9. Also on that same Pref­er­ence screen is the option to turn off Server-Side Includes. This will speed up the response time on any page that has server-side include files.
10. In the Pref­er­ences > High­light­ing tab, uncheck the dif­fer­ent color highlights.
11. In the Pref­er­ences > Acces­si­bil­ity tab, uncheck the Off­screen Ren­der­ing box.
12. In Pref­er­ences > Code Rewrit­ing, uncheck Rename Form Fields When Past­ing. When this is on, DW scans your doc­u­ment for form fields every time you copy/paste a form field.
13. In Pref­er­ences > Code Hints set the delay to 0. This allows the popup code hint menus to come up right away while you type code instead of being delayed when edit­ing code in code view.
14. In Pref­er­ences > Quick Tag Edi­tor set the delay to 0. This allows the popup code hint menu to come up right away while you type code instead of being delayed when edit­ing tags in the Quick Tag Editor.
15. In Pref­er­ences > Gen­eral set the Faster Table Updat­ing (check). This means that your tables may not update them­selves auto­mat­i­cally each time you make an edit, but the response time of the pro­gram will improve.
16. There are some tricks in the Trans­la­tors folder also. If you remove the trans­la­tors, DW will func­tion more quickly, but you'll also lose a lot of the design-time ren­der­ing of code. If you aren't con­cerned about it, get rid of it. Rename the Con­fig­u­ra­tion > Trans­la­tors > [your server model] folder to some­thing else, and replace it with an empty folder. You'll also lose the func­tion­al­ity of server behav­iors, but if you are strictly using the code win­dow, this may not be a con­cern. Try it out: rename the Trans­la­tors folder to Trans­la­torsSAVE, and cre­ate an empty Trans­la­tors folder. Restart the pro­gram and load some of your code-heavy pages into DW. You'll be amazed how fast the pro­gram responds.
17. If you are on a Mac­in­tosh, set the mem­ory used by DW to a high value — at least 100 Meg is a safe num­ber. Also, rebuild your desk­top often.
18. Snip­pets: The snip­pets panel is slow when it con­tains a lot of snip­pets. Remove the snip­pets you don't use (prob­a­bly all of the pre­in­stalled snip­pets) by going into the Snip­pets folder and delet­ing or mov­ing the files.
19. When set­ting up your site, leave the set­ting unchecked for Refresh Local File List Automatically.
20. Make sure that you check the Enable Cache set­ting in the Site panel (Local Info page). Check the Cache set­ting in the Bind­ings panel by right-clicking on any data bind­ing that is defined, such as a Record­set, and make sure that Cache is checked.
21. In the Site panel, in the Design Notes tab, uncheck Main­tain Design Notes. You'll lose the func­tion­al­ity of Design Notes, but that may not be an issue for you.
22. In the Site panel, in the Test­ing Server panel, leave the set­ting unchecked for Refresh Remote File List Automatically.
23. Go to Pref­er­ences > Gen­eral > Max­i­mum Num­ber of His­tory Steps. If you don't have a lot of mem­ory, you can decrease this set­ting. This is a very use­ful fea­ture of course, so use your judg­ment (i.e., don't set it too low.)
24. There are some issues with the Front­page Pub­lish com­mands.