Disable Touchscreen and Metro

My laptop came with 8.1 pre-installed on it but I have it set up so it boots directly into the 7 desktop with classic menus. So I find that I never use the Touchscreen nor do I ever go to the metro side. So, I was wondering

1. How to disable the Touchscreen?

2. How to prevent the metro part from loading into memory since I never use it?

Thanks.

The first part is rather easy. Go to Control Panel-->Hardware and Sound-->Device Manager It may prompt for admin password, so enter that.

Under Human Interface Devices, there should be something that says "HID compliant touch screen". Right click and click disable. You may need to restart.

Your second question is a little more difficult. There are many ways to bring up the start screen. Fortunately, you shouldn't have to worry about it being a memory hog, because it isn't. It may have increased my cpu usage by 1% (on a crappy dual-core) and didn't affect memory at all. So you really don't need to worry about it.

However, if you really are against it, look at this article on some pointers How to Get Rid of the Modern Environment on a Windows 8 PC

That should be about it

Thank you ironman. That is very informative and helpful.