Dealing with Too Many Fonts in Windows?

Some Windows users are not aware that it is the operating system that stores and manages fonts on the computer, and not the individual applications that use them.

However, with every application you install on your computer, such as word processing and desktop publishers, more and more fonts accumulate on your computer. It is possible that there are so many fonts on your computer that performance will start to degrade.

Installing and uninstalling fonts in Windows is straightforward, but there is a way to restore fonts on your computer by only including those that originally came with Windows.

This way, you can start over and get your computer to work as expected when you use an application that uses fonts stored and managed by Windows.

Why do you deal with so many lines?

As stated above, too many fonts can slow down your computer when using applications such as word processing and spreadsheets that use Windows controlled fonts.

This performance degradation can manifest itself as applications taking a long time to load, making it nearly impossible to use the font dropdown menu in the application, and too much memory being used by your computer to manage all of these fonts.

There are no hard and fast rules about how many fonts are too many; it depends on how many fonts you have installed in Windows, how much memory you have on your PC and what kind of processor you have.

Working with too many fonts means removing the ones you don’t need. When you do this, you will also notice that it is easier to find the font you want because you don’t have to wade through hundreds of fonts.

Restore default fonts in Windows

To restore Windows to default font counts, start by logging in with an account with administrator rights. The following procedure works in Windows Vista, 7, 8 and Windows 10. Click Start> Control Panel.

In the Control Panel window, click Appearance and Personalization and then Fonts. You can also just click “Start” and type fonts in the search box.

You should now look at the Font Control Panel. Please note that all fonts installed on your PC are listed here. To see how many fonts you have installed on Windows, look at the bottom of the window. This is where Windows tells you how many fonts are installed on your computer.

To reset only the fonts on your computer to those that came with Windows, click the link on the left side of the window called Font Options.

In the Font Settings section of the window, click the Restore Default Font Settings button and follow the instructions on the screen. When this is done, only the fonts provided with Windows will appear in the list of fonts installed on your computer.

As stated above, there is no universal number of fonts that can be installed on a PC before they start slowing down your PC and applications. However, on a moderately powerful computer with about 2GB of RAM, problems can occur when installing 1000 to 1200 fonts.

Of course, you can also remove the fonts you don’t need one at a time. However, before you do this, you should back up all your fonts in a separate location in case you delete the font and later realize that you want it to return to the list of available fonts in your applications.

In fact, periodically backing up your fonts is a good way to make sure you don’t have to look for the font you want but removed previously. Enjoy!

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