Does saving files on the Desktop slow a computer?

I use a mac, but if you saw my desktop you would freak out. I probably have 300 files sitting on there. The only time my comp is ever slow is when I've got Dreamweaver and Photoshop open at the same time, and that's only if there are multiple projects going on in each.

I believe it does. When my desktop gets clogged up, my pc responds way slower.
So there has to be some sort of correlation.


Reinhardt

It does slow things down...but not a lot.

The reason is, windows has to redraw the screen everytime you want to see your desktop. So, it has to grab the icon files from wherever they are on your PC, put them in the right place, and render them.

I put my files on Amazon S3

The computer is the cloud these days...and vice-versa.

Steve

The Windows Desktop is actually just another folder, it's a unique folder simply because it's contents are displayed on your desktop. Ideally you only should be placing shortcuts on the desktop but many people do use it for file storage.

There are couple of reasons that doing this can slow your computer down:

1 - The more items on the desktop, be it files or shortcuts, the longer it takes to draw the screen. On most modern computers this isn't really a big issue.

2 - Your desktop is part of your Windows Profile. When you logoff or shutdown the contents of your profile are saved. If you have files (as opposed to shortcuts) in your profile then this process will take longer.

3 - Item 2 is especially a concern if you are on a Windows network and are using "Roaming Profiles". Unless you are in a corporate environment you probably don't do that. This is the situation where saving items on the desktop can severely slow down your computers login and logoff time - the whole profile is saved to your network share on logoff and reloaded to your desktop when you log in. I've seen profiles that take over 5 minutes to load because the user has saved everything to the desktop.

Personally I have only 1 item on my entire desktop on all my Windows machines - my Recycle bin. I no longer use desktop icons, I place my most used program icons in the QuickLaunch taskbar instead. I really like the clean look it gives my desktop.

Bill

Got some couple of tips from here. Personally, I put all my important files on my hard drives. I don't really like to see my files stacked on my desktop.

I believe if you have less space on your working drive (where your OS is installed) then your computer would be slow.. I have myself seen messages that your working drive is full or something similar when my C drive was almost full..

Since the Desktop folder is created on the same drive as the drive in which your OS is installed your computer will get slow if you have huge files on desktop.. If however you have hundreds of text files on your desktop, I don't believe it would affect your computer much... I had a senior in my office who had thousands of text files on his desktop.. yeah sounds crazy but it was true but his computer didn't seem that slow to me...

Hope that helps,


Cheers,

yes it does, organize them into folders in your documents

I have a folder somewhere named "Downloads" and I have many sub-folders in it to help me organize things in some reasonable manner.

If you've got Windows Vista or 7, you should either put it into your "My Documents" folder, or in the root of another drive (other than C.

As has been mentioned, you're best to have only shortcuts on your desktop.

Mac's OS X uses a completely different way of managing things, so stuff on the desktop isn't as much of a problem. (I have the greatest problems in my Mac due to how much memory leakage and CPU overhead the various browsers consume.)

-David

I have a lots of files on my desktop: The reason being is that if I put then into a My Documents folder I usually forget about them. When I am working on a theory or new ideas I like everything in front of me. Hundreds of times I have had a great idea by looking something at I put into my desktop and it is in front of me. In a document's folder everything just gets forgotten about, important links don't get visited, there could be potential revenue earner on there. As the driving force in my business, is up to to me come up with new ideas and this is how I like to work others may have a different approach.

There is a programme called autoruns from sysinternals.com which lets you decide what you want to ran as start up which use to cut start up time . The thing which slows the system down is the start up programmes being loaded. Be careful what you disable though!

For back up I have a complete backed up cloned hard disk which is regularly updated.