Long, long time ago in a bedroom not so far
away I was booting up my laptop. As my laptop was loading Windows, I
couldn't help but notice the desktop icons took a good amount of time to
appear. Then a thought hit me: What if I hide the desktop icons --
would that make my boot time faster? After all, with the excellent
search box embedded in the Windows 7 Start Menu that will be no more soon,
I rarely even used my desktop icons anyway; what could go wrong. So I
gave it a try. And, to my pleasant surprise, p-value was < .05 -- the
null hypothesis was rejected: My Windows indeed did load faster with no
desktop icons present.
How To Turn Off Desktop Icons?
Note: This tip should work on Windows XP, Vista, and Win7. It may work on Win8.
Easy. Right-click on your desktop, go to View, and uncheck Show desktop icons:
Once Show desktop icons is checked, the icons on your desktop won't show. They aren't deleted -- they just won't show. To reshow the icons, simply recheck Show desktop icons.
I'm not sure what the technical reason behind this is (aside from the whole "there are fewer things to load" explanation) and frankly I don't know. Since that time long ago, I have rarely ever had the icons my desktop showing and am a better person for it.. If you have trouble with slow Windows boot, you may want to do the same.
