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I have the dubious honor of cleaning up my father in law's malware infested laptop. I think I almost have the malware issue solved, and now I am turning my attention to general performance. Do you think that 330 installed fonts will cause noticeable issues on the following machine?

Update After clearing most of the active problems from the machine, I came to the conclusion that the Antivirus program I installed was the main cause of the tremendous performance issues I was seeing. It seems that a poor old laptop with 512 mb of ram can't really handle AVG's full internet protection suite. Thanks for all the answers - I will agree that 300 fonts won't do anything to a healthy modern machine.

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    Your first two sentences were fun to read but kind of unrelated to the question. :P
    – user541686
    Commented May 21, 2011 at 8:00

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Why don't you try moving them out and seeing if you get a difference? :-)

It shouldn't, but like everything, it depends on the program. Some programs (Inkscape, Pidgin, etc.) for some reason load all the fonts on a system, and so will slow down; in general, though, there shouldn't be any issue, especially with just 330 fonts.

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  • That is certainly a valid question... The computer is slow enough, and my time short enough that I was hoping to hear a strong opinion one way out another. I'll probably see if I can remove all but the standard windows installed fonts.
    – jlnorsworthy
    Commented May 21, 2011 at 15:48
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I once had several THOUSAND fonts installed. It did start to impact performance, but only once I got to 1000+, and even then this was Win 98 on a system with hardware that pales in comparison to what your machine has.

I think that if those fonts are affecting performance, it's probably negligeable. I would focus your attention on other things that may be slowing down the system -- programs running at boot time (especially on laptops), very large hardware drivers which aren't being used, etc.

The best thing to do would be (and always is) a clean install of the OS, but sometimes that just isn't an option.

Good luck!

In other news, you'll probably want to read this post.

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  • Thanks, I've seen (and laughed at) that post before. I don't actually mind helping out FIL - as in-laws go, I got fairly lucky. My tone above was mostly looking for sympathy answers :)
    – jlnorsworthy
    Commented May 23, 2011 at 6:23
  • haha fair enough. Glad it everything worked out for you :)
    – Codebling
    Commented May 23, 2011 at 6:53
  • Well, I wouldn't state that everything has worked out yet...Using ProcessExplorer and AutoRuns, I have managed to boot into a machine that acts normal... until I get on the internet (before, even opening an explorer window took upwards of 30 seconds) I still get redirects on google searches, and a svchost.exe process that spawns with nothing in it, yet takes over 100 megs of ram (remember I only have 512). I'll post a Q about that one, but I'm going to bed first!
    – jlnorsworthy
    Commented May 23, 2011 at 7:23
  • wow...good times? Try turning on signature verification in ProcessExplorer and adding the Company field. Easy way to do basic verification malicious processes..
    – Codebling
    Commented May 24, 2011 at 15:51
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Fonts decrease the loading time of a OS. as they seem to be copied from the HDD every time OS boots up. So it will be good if a system has fewer no. of fonts as much as possible Having too many fonts can really slow down how fast programs start up. Some people say have no more than 500 fonts installed on WinXP, but I personally try to keep the number of fonts below 200. The less you have the faster your programs that use them (office software, graphic programs etc..) will load.

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