[jedimaster24]

Greetings and salutations fellows! I have been researching on Windows XP Professional Edition operating system from many perspectives from its developers to its users and have not been able to have a rough gauge on its limitations about its figures and numbers according to its maximum value supporting protocols. My question is that “Does Windows XP Professional Edition Service Pack 3 on a P4 2.4 GHz 4 GB RAM with 80 GB PATA HDD {windows installed on PATA Drive} and 2 TB SATA HDD has any limitations on the number of an average of 200 MB softwares or programs that can be installed on the system before it starts to overload or slow down. I know it depends on a lot of factors but I need someone to humor me in a hypothetical situation; just wanted to know how many programs I can install because I use a lot of programs, is there a limit to the number of programs? My desktop is slowing down so I need to know whether it depends on the size of the windows folder or the registry entries. My windows folder is 12 GB and there are no errors or viruses; I have done all of the maintenance and optimization services, but my torrent has suddenly started malfunctioning by giving a definite or absolute memory leak with the hard disk slinging and thrashing. I have Bitdefender Antivirus Pro 2011 installed as well and it is working fine and did not slow down the system before plus I have removed all secondary non-essential programs that run at start up and in windows services. I have also scanned the system using 6 different kinds of antivirus softwares with spywares, firewalls, malwarebytes, removal tools and been monitoring the system using process explorer and hijack this {I uninstalled all of the security suites so now there is just one bitdefender antivirus}, but there is no understanding why the system would slow down, when there are only 40 processes running instead of the usual 90 processes that I used to run before when the system never slowed down. My system has 240 programs installed in it and it was working fine until the torrent started overloading the system; if I pause the torrent the system goes back to a normal state, so my question in technical terms would be: “Does the installing of 240 programs result in the overload of the registry?” The reason I am asking this question is that there is no other possibility as I have fully scanned and tuned the system getting rid of all the garbage and there are no extra processes running except the system processes, so if there is an experienced person out there, you’re help would be greatly acknowledged, thank you very much and farewell.

[Curlyben]

In short NO,
It is immaterial how many applications you have installed, but it does matter how many you have running at the same time.
Also you mention the system slows when running bit Torrent, not a surprise as the P4 is an older lower power single core CPU and is becoming "bogged down" with processing.

[ScottGem]

The only limitation on how many applications can be installed is the amount of hard drive space you have. Apps are stored on your drives. An 80G drive is fairly small by today's standards. However, I have a 100G partition that I use for the installation of apps and it has only 12G used and I also have a lot of installed apps.

As noted, how many apps are loaded (running) at one time is limited by RAM and the capabilities of your processor to multi-task.