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I store thousands of files directly on the desktop folder.
When I tell that to some people, they begin to yell "you're making the computer slower!" without any rigorous arguments whatsoever, just like the reaction one often gets on whether emptier disk or less fragmentated files leads to a better performance.
This answer deals with millions of files, which is much more than what I'm having. However, files on desktop is different in that it is shown on the desktop view, most importantly would be that they're shown at all times.
Does putting many files on desktop affect computer performance?
Possible duplicate of Is that true that if you keep bulky files on the Desktop then Windows slow down? I know it asks about big files, but factors like indexing, icon extraction etc. have also been addressed there which are applicable to your situation.
– Karan – 2015-05-28T02:34:33.6431
It may add a (very tiny, but possibly slightly more than 0.1 seconds, which is the cutoff for an "instant load" feel) pause the first time the desktop is loaded so it can be cached, but past that it shouldn't affect preformace as long as your computer isn't 10 years old.
– Jon – 2015-05-28T03:08:30.873@Karan The answers there are not useful, since most of them are very specific (.zip files on Vista, shortcuts, network profiles). And some of them are anecdotes, which aren't helpful either. – user337370 – 2015-05-28T04:51:54.457
Icon extraction from EXEs and shortcuts, indexing and the like are the only factors to be considered and they're all mentioned as far as I can see. Anyway it's only going to have a minimal impact, that too on startup mostly, and if you have an SSD then the impact will be further reduced to a little bit of increased caching and thus a tiny bit less free memory perhaps. So technically the answer would probably be Yes, but whether observable in normal usage on modern systems, No. – Karan – 2015-05-28T05:55:52.373
Desktop a bad place to store documents, if the user account ever gets deleted by some strange event, you could lose all of them. Be sure to back them up to another place outside the user account folders. – Moab – 2015-05-29T03:07:43.377
All about Windows file fragmentation – Moab – 2015-05-29T03:33:06.813