Intel Management Engine Interface

You can disable it without any performance or functionality compromises you’d likely care about, but if you’re thinking about doing that for security reasons, that won’t be effective. The Intel ME is essentially a co-processor that runs underneath the OS, and the drivers just allow things like pop-up notifications within Windows for things going on in Intel ME and I think a configuration interface — but exploitable vulnerabilities remain exploitable because they run underneath the OS. For example, if your system was ordered with the vPro Advanced Features option, it has a full-blown VNC interface at the hardware level that allows you to remotely control the system even while it’s shut down. However, that option is typically not ordered, and even when it is, that VNC functionality (called Intel AMT KVM) is not enabled by default.