Removing unused fonts to improve Windows speed (part 2)

It’s been almost a week since I removed half of the fonts from my system and here’s what I’ve learnt;

Windows.
Does it load faster? I don’t know – I wasn’t sitting there with a stop watch timing it before the change so I can’t give you accurate timings…
Does it seem to load faster? Absolutely. I don’t know if it’s just a placebo but it certainly feels like it’s starting faster….

Firefox.
Does it load faster? Absolutely. The load time for FF has reduced by about 50%

Other.
No software has complained about missing fonts (and I’ve ran just about everything in my start menu as well as all my other utilities)

Conclusion.
Is it worth doing? I think so… My general feeling is that my laptop boots slightly quicker, Firefox definitely loads quicker and nothing has complained (so far). If nothing else it doesn’t seem to have damaged my system.

Recommended: for making Firefox faster.

Removing unused fonts to improve Windows speed (part 1)

I’ve known for quite a while that the speed bottleneck in my laptop is the hard drive – It’s fairly rare that I can max out both cores of the CPU (usually only when I’m compiling software, or encoding video) so I’ve been playing around with ProcessMon on my machine trying to see where I can get some more speed at startup and at application load. I noticed that when I start Firefox it reads a heap of fonts before it loads… which led to a Google search… which led to this article: Why you should check your Fonts Folder regularly.

“1000 fonts would delay system boot time by 30 seconds compared to 5.33 seconds if only 100 fonts are installed on the system”

Which led to me having a look at my fonts folder….

Somehow I have 554 fonts installed on my hachine (including a 23Mb Unicode version of the Arial font) and large number of others I don’t recognise.

So, time to back up my fonts, start deleting them and see what we can achieve.

Note: To back up your fonts you can use these commands at a DOS prompt:

c:
mkdir c:fontsbak
copy c:windowsfonts*.* c:fontsbak

Now to start deleting…

References

ProcessMon http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896645.aspx
Why you should check your Fonts Folder regularly – http://www.ghacks.net/2007/08/15/why-you-should-check-your-fonts-folder-regularly/

Update: I’m now down to 220 font files – I’ll update you in a few days
after several reboots and we’ll see if there’s any noticeable
difference.