Your Computer Desktop

 

When you look at your computer desktop, is it a mess of different file icons, and program icons or is it neat and tidy with limited icons on the screen?

Now, the reason that this question is asked is to see if your desktop is part of the reason why your computer takes so long to start up when you power it up. Recently I was able to see a desktop on a monitor, and you couldn’t see very much of the background because of all the different icons that were there. This person was also complaining that his computer was no good because it just took way too long to start up.

Here are some questions that I asked this person about their computer.

• How often do you reboot your computer?
• Are all these icons on your desktop necessary?

Now these are the answers that I got.

• I don’t reboot my system very often because it just takes way too long to start up again.
• All of these icons are necessary so that I can do my job, and he immediately pulls up a photo that has nothing to do with work.

What is very important to understand is that a lot of the icons on the desktop were for files that he felt he needed to access quickly. Of course, these files were located on a server and not on his computer (or at least I hope they were on the server). I tried to explain to him that having all these file icons on his desktop was a major reason why his system took so long to startup. When you have icons on your desktop, what happens when the system starts up is it must look up each of these files so that it can draw it on the desktop. The more files you have on your desktop, the longer it is going to take for your system to start up. If you need access to these files quickly, it is better to have them in a folder elsewhere and then just the link to the folder on the desktop. The only time the files will be searched for is when you click the link.

So, the best thing you can do to ensure that your computer starts up at a reasonable speed is to limit the number of icons that you have on your desktop, especially icons that are to files. Shortcuts can be useful but remember that they can also impact how you work.