Do many program shortcuts on home screen slow down computers?

No. This is not true. There is no connection between the number of shortcuts, other files or folders you have on your desktop (or anywhere) and the performance of a pc. These files are stored on you hard drive – not in memory.

No. @homind beat me to it – I was going to say the same thing.

Only ten? That’s nothing. A friend of mine,rather than organizing hers into bookmarks , has her screen plastered with over a hundred icons for sites.

oh @Buttonstc that sounds a little messy… I am a clean freak with a tendency to organize my computer and sometimes other people’s too :)

You’re right and it was difficult for me to bite my tongue and resist the urge to nag her about it.

I obviously would not consider organizing them for her because then she’d never be able to find anything ever again.

And oddly enough, in all the rest of her life she’s far more organized than I.

I’m organized mentally but I’ve got books and papers piled everywhere willy-nilly. I’m clean but just not neat. My place typically looks like a bomb hit it while hers is tidy.

But our desktops are the reverse. But she’s one of my best friends in the whole world and I just let it be. She’s happy with it that way (or at least functional) so I’m the last one to judge.

But we do have a chuckle over it now and again. I’m just lucky that reason prevailed and I was able to get her to switch from IE to Firefox.

Odd things like that make us unique! Many people who like to be neat have their messy places (like a closet or a bookshelf). I am glad you changed her opinion about IE!

I don’t know if it’s still true but older versions of windows (XP for example) loaded all the files on your desktop into memory when you logged in. Shortcuts aren’t a problem as they are very small but if you storeed a lot of pics or video to your desktop you’d definitely noticed an improvement when they were moved else where.

This actually used to be true but no longer is. On my old Performa 6214 with 8 megs of RAM and 66 MHZ processor it was a issue. On modern computers it doesn’t matter. It is nothing in the overall scheme.