desktop icons

[george6210]

My desktop is covered with icons. Does this slow down the computer? I saw a "how to" on YouTube for Windows XP and the instructor said that having too many icons on the Windows desktop will slpw it down?

Minimac 2.26 GHz, 4 GB Ram

[Bandit Bill]

No. This is not applicable to modern computers.

If we really want to pick things apart, a solid background is the most efficient background. Therefore when you are moving/resizing windows it is very easy for the video card to redraw the image underneath. Wallpaper or icons involves redrawing images each time something moves. It also involves accessing the info from the files that have the thumbnail data.

Having a solid desktop background and a clean desktop would have been a slight performance increase on an older (pre-1995 to 2000) computer. It would have next to nil impact on modern computers.

[Smithcraft]

I am aware that as late as 10.4, custom icons could have an impact on the Finder, that would result in the Finder using more CPU than with generic icons.

However the easiest way to test if something is causing issues on your computer is to use either the terminal and check CPU usage, or use the Activity Monitor to do the same. In this case if you check the CPU usage with all the icons on the desktop, and then with all the icons hidden in a folder or something, it should be nearly the same.

SC
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Grumpy old man of computing.

[Desktop] G4 mini - 1.5Ghz 1GB 80GB HDD - Newer miniStack v2 500GB - 10.5.8

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