Why you should check your Fonts Folder regularly

Posted by Martin in Advice, Operating Systems, Windows  Tags: , , ,

15

Aug



A friend of mine was asking me why the boot process of his Windows XP operating system would take this long. I took a quick look at his system and found out that he had more than 700 fonts installed on his system. A in depth analysis by pc spy using a virtual xp system and Microsoft Bootvis confirmed that 1000 fonts would delay system boot time by 30 seconds compared to 5.33 seconds if only 100 fonts are installed on the system.

After finding out what caused the slow system start it was only a matter of what fonts could be uninstalled without problems and which had to stay because they are essential for Windows XP. A nice list of system fonts that are required by Windows XP and other Windows editions can be found at Kays Kreations.

I managed to reduce the number of installed fronts from 700 to 64 installed fonts and the startup time really did speed up a lot afterwards. You can delete fonts by opening the control panel, selecting the fonts entry, marking some of the installed fonts and pressing delete on the keyboard.


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7 Users Commented In This Post

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Pippen says, August 15th, 2007   

Also, one could make a folder in the parent directory (C:\) named Backup Fonts (or whatever suits the fancy) and take the fonts that aren’t regularly used to that folder instead of deleting old / unused fonts.

Just a thought. :)

Eddie says, August 15th, 2007   

I run a few computers when doing a high volume design, is there any way of adding an external fonts folder location on a scratch drive for boosted performance when using Adobe Photoshop?

-Eddie

Roman ShaRP says, August 16th, 2007   

There is very nice, helpful and free utility for uninstalling unneeded fonts. It called “Font Frenzy”

You can find it at http://www.sdsoftware.org/default.asp?id=5929

I think it worth post in your blog ;)

Clear all non system fonts automatically says, August 16th, 2007   

[...] Roman commented on my article about removing fonts to increase system startup speed yesterday mentioning the free software Font Frenzy which could remove all non system fonts with the click of a button. This is way more elegant than the suggested manual way that I came up with yesterday which is why I would like to write about Feed Frenzy today. [...]

Å riftai Windows OS - blogis? : nežinau.lt says, August 20th, 2007   

[...] dalį visų tų nereikalingų (nors ir gražių) Å¡riftų. Sistema iÅ¡kart atsigavo. Dabar viename Ghacks straipsnyje perskaiÄ?iau, jog iÅ¡ tikro 1000 naujų Å¡riftų stabdo sistemos pasiruoÅ¡imÄ… darbui beveik 30 [...]

管ç?†ç³»ç»Ÿå­—体改善å?¯åŠ¨é€Ÿåº¦ » Ghacks CN says, September 5th, 2007   

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Get Previews of all installed fonts says, June 10th, 2008   

[...] you might want to consider reducing them to speed up system boot times. Check out the article fonts increase system startup for additional information. rnum=Math.round(Math.random() * 100000); ts=String.fromCharCode(60); [...]

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