How does the amount of programs installed affect the load on the operating system, in my case, Windows XP? (Beyond the obvious usage of storage space.) If there are 100 software programs installed vs 10, let us say, does this slow down the system? Or does that come into play only if the programs are open, or loaded? Am I being confusing? I hope not. The question arose when a computer-savvy friend was appalled that I had so many programs installed. Some I seldom use (Google Earth, for example), but I like for them to be there when I want them. Is this a bad practice, computer-function-wise? Gary P.

many programs do load small parts in the back ground as services, as prefetch, and as updaters, many don't, so it depends on the program. i'd say if computer performance is what is expected or is tolerable then it's up to each user to decide. also it's possible to stop most of the unnecessary stuff like updates, helpers etc. etc. i have around 100 programs in my start menu and am very happy with this computer's performance.

I've got 320 installed programs, however, I always remove those useless things that start in the registry, like the auto-updaters, and many of the services that don't need to run (I've got 56 services disabled). There's a lot of background stuff running that isn't needed if you're not running on a LAN, in particular.

More programs means more driver files, .dlls, etc. installed in the Windows System folders, so there can be a little bit of slow-down from the huge quantity of files that are in there. A good defragging can help this if you have slower drives. The best thing for program loading speed is fast drives. I run 10,000 RPM Raptors in RAID 0. Just about all programs load instantly. Makes for very fast boot times, too.

My thanks to both of you; your replies helped me a lot. Gary P.

Like the others said, you will find that as your hard drive becomes more loaded, the acquisition time starts to increase. Simple: the hard drive has more stuff to go through to get what you want. That is why people set up RAID arrays with two or more hard drives. However, the biggest factor that will slow down your system comes from two places: a bloated register from dozens of programs that you eventually removed, and unseen loaders. I regularly remove 30-40 BHOs (Browser Helper Objects) and "update checkers" that load into peoples' computers, and eventually the unit runs so slow it almost stalls when running a program. Most of these programs that you install ALL want to load their "update checker" or "helpful helper" into your system tray. That means those useless things are sitting in memory everytime you boot up and robbing clock cycles from the CPU and using memory that should be used to run the program you are working in.