Do several installed fonts on a system affect system performance or boot time in Windows?
2013-09
szekelya
Earlier it was common to believe that many (never seen defined what many means) fonts will slow down windows.
Is that still a valid issue on today's hardware with Windows Vista/7?
There are some font servers out there -such as NexusFont- that can be used to serve the applications with fonts when needed, which means huge numbers of fonts won't have to be installed into the system.
Does anyone have real experience with this? I could use a fontserver, uninstall almost all fonts from windows (I'd leave arial/times/courier/segoe/consolas/calibri and the system fonts like fixedsys, marlett, wingdings) and put them under the fontserver. Would it have any visible performance effect on system boot time and system performance? The PC I'm maintaining (regular proper defrags don't count performance tuning) is a relatively modern HP laptop with enough memory, so it's not that I'd have to use all last resorts.
MaxMackie
Yes it will definitely slow down your computer if you're running Windows. To notice the effects you'll need upwards of a couple thousand fonts installed. Windows (and to SOME extend some flavors of Linux) will load the whole font set at startup, causing it to lock up.
Try and keep the fonts around the 600-1000 mark if you really need that many. If that isn't enough than you a font server like you said.
Ashwin
I switched over to Cleartype on Windows XP about 3 years ago. And in the Theme settings I used Vista (made-for-Cleartype) fonts for all the UI widgets.
However, certain system dialogs of Windows and Windows utilities still show up in the older Windows font. That now looks butt-ugly under Cleartype. Anyone knows how to change this system font too?
Daniel Rikowski
Sometimes the font is hard-coded into the application.
In that case you have no chance to change their font through the global Windows settings.
Remember when Microsoft decided to lighten the dialog background color a little bit? (Windows 2000/ME) Suddenly many applications had dialogs with a mixture of dark and light gray colors. (Most times when glyphs/icons were not transparent and instead had the old dialog color background)