Job Discussion Forums

[dmb]

I have around 50 icons on my desktop. A friend said I shouldn't have so many as it slows the computer down. Is this true?

[Zero Hero]

Yes.

[moonraven]

With 50 icons, I am surprised that your computer is moving at all. I suppose it depends on what those icons frepresent. Games, for example, turn a normal computer into a snail computer/

[Chris_Crossley]

EF English First is an organisation I worked for for two years here in Wuhan.

"What has this got to do with the topic?!" I hear you cry. Actually, when I was acting DoS, I had plenty of desktop icons on my school's lap top. (Now ex-)Senior Academic Operations Manager Steve Allen came to visit my school in Wuhan during May of 2003 and, during a one-to-one briefing in my office, he noticed that there were a lot of desktop icons, more than he would have liked.

Without warning, he virtually seized the lap-top and started linking all the relevant pages to "Favorites", so that only the vital ones ("vital" being a relative term, of course) were left, and he felt satisfied.

So here is an example of a higher-up in the EF China hierarchy actually interfering with a laptop that he had no responsiblity for whatsoever. Who the hell did he think he was?! That was not his job! How would he have liked it if I had started interfering with his lap-top?! AARGH!

Three months after his visit, the lap-top got nicked.

[31]

That is awful. No wonder he is an ex-manager. Fancy TEFLers getting treated like that.

[Stephen Jones]

Depends what the icons represent.

If the icons represent shortcuts to programs or documents, they don't slow down your computer much, though you might run out of GDIs or handles if you had a few hundred.

However if the icons represent actual documents, or worst still actual programs, then your computer will take longer to boot since it will need to load all the documents and programs into memory. Even so the effect on computer speed should be negligible. If they are documents then the danger of file corruption is more serious.

The main problem with too many icons on the computer desktop is the same as too many documents on the real one; it makes it harder to find tnings. To put some order into the clutter I cluster icons together according to type. Disk icons down the side, internet icons in the top rignt=hand corner, system icons in the middle and so on.

[Aramas]

Desktop icons are for the computer illiterate. All you need is a well structured file system for documents, and 'Start Menu' shortcuts for any frequently used software.

I haven't left a single icon on my desktop for ten years, and I immediately delete any that sofware installs. TweakUI/Powertools allows the removal of the crap that Windows puts there.

[dmb]

Thanks guys. in the process of deleting and reorganising.

[Zero Hero]

What 'Stephen Jones' says there is accurate; it does of course depend on what is meant by an 'icon'. If it is actually a piece of software then such icons will slow down a computer to a salient extent, for the reasons he states. It is a bit more complex than that, but the details are not all that important.

One thing I would add to the information offered by 'Jones', though, is that icons are also often insecure (and thus vulnerable to attack when you are online). Many hackers and crackers scan for unprotected desktop icons as a means of getting an initial grip on a computer system. Some of the things done in 'the wild' are so lax and unsafe they often shock the members of 'the zoo', and placing icons (of the variant alluded to by 'Jones') on a desktop is one of them.

[Stephen Jones]

Just as a matter of interest ZH, since when do proper nouns go within inverted commas?

[denise]

Wow, this is news to me. I always thought of icons as similar to keys--the more you have, the more important a person you are. Whenever I see a computer with just half a dozen or so icons, I wonder why that person even has a computer, since he/she doesn�t seem to use it!

Maybe I just like clutter, though.

d