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.
continue reading "Why you should check your Fonts Folder regularly"