Will Installing More Games Affect My PC's Performance?

[Brown Cap]

I am going to give you the short story: Steam Sale

I now have a bunch of new games I really want to try.

The Computer I have been using is my college laptop: An HP Elitebook 8560p
It's a pretty nice machine, and it is going on it's third year.
Up until now, I have been using to play TF2, Project Zomboid, and a couple relatively low-demand (nothing like Bioshock or COD, which would require the machine to work pretty hard) games of that nature.

But now, I want to play Half Life, Morrowind, and an old 2003 Tom Clancy Game.

The question: If I install all of them, and maybe even one or two more, will that slow down the computer? I have always tried to keep the number of installed games on this laptop to a minimum, never exceeding five.

Memory doesn't have a relationship with performance, yes?
Furthermore, is there anything (free) I can do to boost said performance?

 

[CrystalShadow]

Yeah... Unless you are literally filling all the free space on your drive, it won't really matter that much.

Even then... You have to get down to something as low as 10-15% of empty space left before you'll really notice anything.

If your computer still uses a mechanical disk, you'll probably do more harm to performance by constantly installing and uninstalling things.

Because the best way to kill hard-drive performance is by causing drive fragmentation. And frequently adding and removing things is a great way of causing a lot of fragmentation...

But overall, the amount of stuff your computer loads into memory will matter more, most of the time.
There are lots of things you could install that will try and do stuff at startup, but this is usually stuff other than games. (Antivirus software is notorious for really slowing a system down)

Some games do install extra stuff, but usually only if it isn't already there. (Things like steam and Origin and the like)

 

[renegade7]

Some file systems slow down a little when the disk starts to fill up, especially if it's partitioned. IIRC it's NTFS that can sometimes be a problem with this. Defragmenting will solve that, if it happens.

There's also the possibility that the registry could start to get bloated if you install a lot of things.

Overall, it shouldn't be a problem though.