Over the years I have noticed people love to just drop everything onto their desktop. Be it shortcuts, pictures or files they are actively working on, the desktop is the common gathering place. While this may work for helping you get your work done it also increases the amount of time your computer takes to boot up.
More specifically, when you log into Windows the icons on the desktop are redrawn several times while your desktop is initially loading. So having fewer icons on your desktop will decrease the time it takes to load. Depending on how many icons you use and how fast your machine is, the time can be negligible, but if you have 100+ icons on your desktop you are probably going to notice it.
Ultimately, what it all comes down to is what works best for you. Waiting an additional 10-30 seconds when your machine is loading is small beans if you are more productive dropping everything on the desktop. One thing to try though is to simply create a folder on your desktop and move all your icons there.
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It’s not just start up, but the whole desktop is redrawn all the time in Windows. About every 30 seconds. It’s the same if you have many deleted items within the ‘Recycle Bin’. Because that too is also redrawn.
I only have one single icon on the desktop & that’s the recycle bin, nothing else.
There are many good reasons for reducing the number of icons on the desktop. But reducing boot time is not one of them. The time to update 100+ icons will not be noticeable, even on a very slow system.
Larry Miller
Microsoft MCSA
While having a larger number of desk-top icons itself may not be a reason for the delay in booting,this also needs to be looked into and reverified if having a larger number of icons really consume so much time to deserve shifting of all icons to a seperate folder which by itself defeats the very purpose of having icons! To me an icon serves as reminder when one looks at the icon after renaming it appropriately.
Often I use these icons as an itinerary of my Travel, Number of an Order that I have booked or an appointment of that day!
Everytime I boot up the Frostwire icon comes up and this greatly slows up my accessing Outlook Express and Internet Explorer.