Travel Technology - Will deleting fonts speed up WinXP

WinXP SP2....

Will deleting fonts from my fonts folder make Windows load or run faster?

I probably never use 3/4 or more of the fonts.

Yes it will. Just make sure you don't delete any fonts you are currently using. And instead of deleting them I suggest you simply move them to a folder somewhere on your machine in case you need one of them in the future.

When does Windows load fonts: on startup or when an Office app is opened? I would think that in the course of email/web browsing it wouldn't be touching the fonts folder that frequently.

Yes it will.

Why? And is it significant?

-David

If you are curious to know what loads when windows starts, and how how resources are distributed, do this.

Go to Start, Run, type MSCONFIG, Enter. This will show you in detail. Be careful, DO NOT edit or change anything, as this can damage your system.

Why? And is it significant?

-David

Well, Windows doesn't load them at startup, but some applications will load a bunch of them as cache. They can also simply take up a load of space.

How do you delete the fonts?

How do you delete the fonts?

Here's a nice little tutorial:
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1786005,00.asp

The article also has some other suggestions to speed up your Windows machine.

While it's my opinion that deleting these basic fonts will do little more than propping a book under one side of your computer to speed it up, YMMV. :)

Well, the etremetech article does say that all the fonts are loaded at startup, and I think I may have heard that before.

I guess it will be interesting to see what sort of improvement somebody sees on a real system by trying this.

My boot time is horrendous, but it's because I have so many startup items. (Yes, I've gotten rid of most of the ones I don't need, but you always have to keep up with that.)

-David

Well, the etremetech article does say that all the fonts are loaded at startup, and I think I may have heard that before.

I guess it will be interesting to see what sort of improvement somebody sees on a real system by trying this.

My boot time is horrendous, but it's because I have so many startup items. (Yes, I've gotten rid of most of the ones I don't need, but you always have to keep up with that.)

-David

Have you also checked for unused services?

Have you also checked for unused services?

After posting, I cleaned up a bunch of crap. I had installed a new version of roxio (wife was having problems with her roxio installation, so I put it on my laptop to try it and kept it), and it added several startups and services. In fact, that damn program is startup happy, even if you turn off several of the features in it's preferences. I disabled most of them and changed some to manual from automatic. There were several 'run' keys in the registry I didn't need, so I deleted them too.

Incidentally, qttask (quick time) had a startup run key also, probably from installing itunes, even though I removed it later from the laptop. Every time something updates quick time, it shows up again. Got rid of that too. (again)

I'm back to a reasonable startup configuration.

-David

After posting, I cleaned up a bunch of crap. I had installed a new version of roxio (wife was having problems with her roxio installation, so I put it on my laptop to try it and kept it), and it added several startups and services. In fact, that damn program is startup happy, even if you turn off several of the features in it's preferences. I disabled most of them and changed some to manual from automatic. There were several 'run' keys in the registry I didn't need, so I deleted them too.

Incidentally, qttask (quick time) had a startup run key also, probably from installing itunes, even though I removed it later from the laptop. Every time something updates quick time, it shows up again. Got rid of that too. (again)

I'm back to a reasonable startup configuration.

-David

There are more than just startup keys, head to your control panel, administrative tasks, services and sort by started services, you'll be amazed how much crap is there too.

Maybe it wasn't obvious from the context but I did both the run keys and the services.

Thanks,
-David

While it's my opinion that deleting these basic fonts will do little more than propping a book under one side of your computer to speed it up, YMMV. :)Thanks for the URL, but as spouse is a scrapbooking addict I am forbidden from removing any of the 674 fonts installed on the shared home PC. My mileage would vary from most. :rolleyes:

Yes it will. Just make sure you don't delete any fonts you are currently using. And instead of deleting them I suggest you simply move them to a folder somewhere on your machine in case you need one of them in the future.

Scott advocates moving instead of deleting fonts and I agree. The problem with this approach is that, the second you want to use a new font, or the second someone sends you a document with a font other than Times New Roman or Arial, you may have problems viewing and/or printing the document.

While this is a free way to speed up the ol' computer, a dirt cheap way these days is simply to increase the RAM. If you have only 256 MB of RAM, adding 256 MB will do far more to speed up the 'puter than any number of tweaks and putterings. If you have 512 MB of RAM, increase it to 1 GB. If you already have 1 GB...okay, then maybe we can talk. :D :D :D

I would probably agree on not advocating deleting fonts. Instead I would goto 'services.msc' from the run prompt, and disable the services you don't need for exampling indexing. That take up quite a bit of memory. For more info services, and what you can safely turn off click here (http://www.dead-eye.net/WinXP%20Services.htm).

Scott advocates moving instead of deleting fonts and I agree. The problem with this approach is that, the second you want to use a new font, or the second someone sends you a document with a font other than Times New Roman or Arial, you may have problems viewing and/or printing the document.

While this is a free way to speed up the ol' computer, a dirt cheap way these days is simply to increase the RAM. If you have only 256 MB of RAM, adding 256 MB will do far more to speed up the 'puter than any number of tweaks and putterings. If you have 512 MB of RAM, increase it to 1 GB. If you already have 1 GB...okay, then maybe we can talk. :D :D :D

I played that game till I hit 4Gb and it still didn't help. :p