Does placing folders with heavy content (1 GB or more) on your desktop slow down your computer?

Question

Windows

There are many answers to these questions and all of them are opposite to each other. So, to clarify the picture finally, I'll ask here:
1) Does placing folders with heavy content on the desktop (from 1 GB and above) slow down the computer?
2) Does placing too many shortcuts on the desktop slow down your computer?
Interested in Windows 7 (32 bit)

Answer 1

No.
It doesn't affect at all.

Answer 2

possibly affects if the user profile is in the domain and the profile is roaming, the first time you log in on a new PC there will be brakes while the files are downloading

Answer 3

Да, когда чиню компы знакомым после жалоб на тормоза, 1м делом удаляю со стола 100гбайтные архивы с фото.
Как влияет? windows indexация содержимого.

Answer 4

According to subjective sensations (did not conduct tests), the number of objects in the profile folder affects the speed of the computer, incl. in documents and on the desktop.
It is the quantity, not the size: if you really need garbage on the desktop, it is better to pack the garbage into archives, and place the shortcuts in folders. This will make everything work much faster.
It's most likely the FS's fault. Those who worked with a large number of objects must have noticed that there can be hundreds of thousands of objects in a folder, and they do not manifest themselves in any way until you open the folder - that's when hellish brakes begin.
Those. The reason is that the profile is constantly open (by the system and many applications), and requests go there very often, so placing unnecessary things there is highly discouraged.
And the reason for the brakes, incl. with folders on the desktop, shortcuts, and Start - not the amount of memory, but disk access.
When updating the desktop, the system is forced to reopen each shortcut, i.e. download from disk and parse each shortcut file, find and load icons to it, open the folder that the shortcut refers to (and this generates another flurry of calls to the FS), check links to executable files, and who knows what else. And so for each label.
If there are folders on the desktop, the situation is even worse: for each folder, the system must draw a content icon, for this it opens the folder and checks each file in it, and if it finds media files, it parses them, generates an icon, then selects several icons, and of them generates a folder icon. At the same time, she does not look inside the subfolders. Therefore, simply stuffing garbage into folders saves - even if the appeal is to the folder where the garbage was, no one will scan the subfolder with garbage, which means that the garbage will remain untouched, and these hundreds of thousands of files will not slow down the system in any way.
And all this applies not only to the desktop - but in general to any visible folders and files in the explorer, and to those where different programs access (all sorts of documents, local, etc. pass-through folders, every program pops in).
Therefore, alternative FMs are so popular, which do not suffer from such garbage, do not generate tons of requests to the disk for the sake of decoration.
All this can be imperceptible only if you have an SSD. But imperceptibly does not mean good: even if all this eats up a small part of the i / o SSD, but nevertheless it eats up, and it's useless - it's better to leave these resources to other applications, especially since the SSD performance on such small operations is very, very finite, about 50 -70Mb/s, and it's easy to eat it up.
The situation is complicated by NTFS - every time a file is accessed, it overwrites its attributes (last access time), and immediately dumps them on the disk (synchronous writing, bypassing buffers), this eats up to half the disk speed. This feature can be turned off, and make life much easier for the disk. Yes, and SSD is nothing to constantly overwrite the MFT.
Well, as a bonus, an indexing service sits on top of all this circus, and constantly monitors the system disk, generating unnecessary requests. It is also better to kill it, and use faster tools for searching, like Everything or SwiftSearch.

Answer 5

Согласен с АртемЪ - не влияет. Если у вас есть проблемы с быстродейтсвием компа, то ищите их в других местах.
Например:
1.могут неадекватно себя вести службы автообновления и индексирования, что бывает сказывается на загрузке процессора. При этом один из процессов svchost отъедает ощутимый процент ЦПУ.
2.При недостатке ОЗУ винда начинает активно использовать своп - это приводит к конкретным тормозам практически на каждый клик.
3.При недостатке свободного места на системном диске или на диске где лежит профиль пользователя (а именно %TEMP%) могут возникнуть задержки - винда будет пытаться регулярно почистить диск.
Вообще, если есть тормоза, начните поиск причины с "диспетчера задач".

Answer 6

Замедляет ли работу компьютера размещение на рабочем столе папок с тяжелым содержимым (от 1 Гб и выше)?

На обычном домашнем компьютере - думаю, нет.
Это распространённое мнение, граничащее с мифом, которое слышно аж с начала нулевых и ранее.
Осмелюсь предположить, что оно связано с таким явлением, когда Проводник рефрешит рабочий стол. Может замечали, что такое происходит после установки какого-то ПО или переназначения ассоциаций расширений. Проводник сбрасывает все изображения иконок на рабочем столе и открытых папках, а затем сразу подгружает их заново.
Скорее всего, во времена более медленных HDD, это драматично сказывалось на очередях к диску как на загрузке ПК, так и на таких триггерах, рефрешивших рабочий стол, ведь все эти данные подгружались каждый раз с диска, блокируя на какое-то время загрузку всего остального.
На современных дисках (не говоря об SSD) и многопоточных операционках, это перестало так сильно ощущаться.