Does having a lot of softwares slow down the PC?

alexistheboss15

Honorable
Jul 9, 2013
37
0
10,530
I have a bunch of softwares installed that I rarely use but may need in the future.

Does this slow down the PC at all? How can I make sure it doesn't? I already went under task manager and turned off all the auto-start processes so nothing starts up with the PC.
 
Solution
it can. depends on your system; usually the hit is not significant after they load, though no promises for dual cored systems, those tend to notice the programs even after they load, and can see a performance hit as a result.

For example, i have an fx8320 overclocked up to 5ghz with 16gb of ram, it doesn't notice programs running in the background. it can boot them all very fast and simply put they put zero strain on my system

I also have an i5-4690k overclocked up to 4.2ghz with 8gb of ram, it DOES notice a lot of programs running in the background ONLY during boot. I run basically the same programs on both pcs; In fact if you timed it for how long it takes to get to the desktop and 100% loaded from my login screen, the FX would...


As long as they don't start up, they won't really effect the performance and RAM. It would probably make your HDD work a little faster if it's free of space a little more but it shouldn't effect performance massively. If you're worried, you could run a free virus scan just to make sure there arn't any active threats on your system. Malwarebytes is a great one:

http://www.malwarebytes.org/

- Sam
 
it can. depends on your system; usually the hit is not significant after they load, though no promises for dual cored systems, those tend to notice the programs even after they load, and can see a performance hit as a result.

For example, i have an fx8320 overclocked up to 5ghz with 16gb of ram, it doesn't notice programs running in the background. it can boot them all very fast and simply put they put zero strain on my system

I also have an i5-4690k overclocked up to 4.2ghz with 8gb of ram, it DOES notice a lot of programs running in the background ONLY during boot. I run basically the same programs on both pcs; In fact if you timed it for how long it takes to get to the desktop and 100% loaded from my login screen, the FX would come out ahead by a little bit even though the i5 has a slightly faster SSD (that said the newer motherboard chipset allows this i5 to perform a full boot much faster)

if you have a bunch of stuff running in the background it will definitely slow down dual core or i3 cpus...
 
Solution

alexistheboss15

Honorable
Jul 9, 2013
37
0
10,530


I use SSDs and yea the softwares don't take up much space, I have 1.5 TB of space and all softwares added together are around 100gb, but games are around 300gb.
 

Reyaz123

Admirable
Open msconfig and if you see many services or startup programs related to a certain 3rd party software, those can slow a system down.

If you have a HDD (not an ssd) disk fragmentation can also slow it down. Luckily this is easily solved with disk defragmentation programs like defraggler