I love my fonts almost as much as I love my morning coffee (which, for a resident, means a lot) — but after I started looking into exactly why Paint.NET started hanging with after trying to select a font, I started finding out that fonts as a whole may be a problem for general computer efficiency.

I don’t have a fast PC. Its about 4 years old, and at 2.3Ghz / 1Gig Ram its pretty slow. Everything loads slow; multi-tasking often gives it angina, and having more than 10 tabs open on Firefox often pushes it into frank heart attack mode.

What I’ve discovered — through LifeHacker, natch, is that having thousands of fonts on your PC can be a top 3 reason why windows become laggy.

According to a study, “fonts” were sandwiched between Norton Antivirus 2006 and followed by Yahoo Instant Messenger.

So — I tried it out.

On my old crotchety PC, I removed about 1000 of my 1800 fonts, and my God, its like its been given a body-transplant!

According to the PCSpy article that LifeHacker is based on, 1000 fonts can increase system delay by as much as 40%! Well, I have no numbers to back it up, but subjectively all the animations are running smoother, programs open up faster, and quite frankly, there is a nice over all sense of well being that is difficult to describe.

Sort of like a Zen-like state. ;)

Of course, the great irony is that font-hoarding is the reason why I got a new PC 4 years ago; my old one was running Windows 98 (not even “SE”), and it literally stopped adding new fonts aftre about 400. It just gave me an error.

Word to the wise: don’t delete ALL of your fonts; some of them are kept on by default, but others may be otherwise critical to other programs on your computer (i.e. firefox, word for windows, notepad) — and it may make everything else look like crap. WHICH ones i’m still sorting out by trial and error. I basically deleted my 1000 oldest fonts (some dated back to 1995!) and kept the newest ones.