Removing Unwanted Fonts

Willabelle Wants To Remove Unused Fonts
As with most of your subscribers I am delighted to have your newsletters coming every week, and have used lots of your suggestions and help.  I also use your Start Page.  I would like to know how to delete lots of fonts that I never use.  Wouldn't that give me lots of room on my hard drive? Thanks, Willabelle.

Answer
Thank you, Willabelle! We appreciate you using our Start Page!

You have to be careful when you uninstall fonts. Why? Because certain fonts are used by Windows to display text in menus, dialog boxes, program windows, and so on. If you uninstall any of the fonts Windows uses, you could left with unreadable menus, program windows, dialog boxes, task bar text, etc.. Fortunately we've gathered a list of fonts which are used by Windows in Windows XP and have created a page that you can view or print out and reference when you decide to uninstall any unnecessary fonts. You can see that list by visiting this page.

Another thing. If you're looking to uninstall fonts to save hard drive space; you need to look somewhere else. Most fonts are rather small (by today's standards). The average size of a font file is around 100-150 KB. You'd have remove between eight and ten of them just to save one megabyte. So unless you have a huge number of fonts, removing the ones you don't use (and Windows doesn't use) isn't going to save you a great deal of hard drive space.

There is another reason to remove unnecessary fonts, and it's not related to hard drive space. If you have a huge number of fonts installed, and you don't have a lot of extra RAM installed, a font folder with tons of fonts can slow Windows down, especially at start up when Windows has to load perhaps thousands of fonts. (Don't laugh! TC is a font addict and has over a thousand fonts! But he uses a trick). So a good reason not to overload your system with fonts that Windows doesn't need and you don't use is that keeping your font folder lean and mean can mean faster boot-ups and a more responsive Windows.

Now, if you're a font addict, like TC, there's a little trick to having thousands of fonts and still have fast boot times and a responsive machine. It's called "Font Xplorer Lite" from Moon Software. It's a freeware program (we've featured it before). What this little application does, is give you the choice of "installing" fonts or loading them only when you want to use them. When you reboot they're flushed from memory and your boot up times will be unaffected. Pretty nifty huh? Where can you get Font Xplorer Lite? We're glad you asked (and we'll try to get the URL right too!). You can visit this page to learn more about and/or download Font Xplorer Lite (it's freeware).