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Why did Windows 7 log on slower for months if you had a solid color background?

devblogs.microsoft.com

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Re: Why did Windows 7 log on slower for months if you had a solid color background?

#21

Post by cowsandmilk »

analog31 wrote: post #13

This relates to something that might have started around that time: The practice of displaying the splash screen for a finite time period, then showing the user environment before the software was fully started . It was suspected that both OS's and apps were doing this, because people notice when "the app takes too long to load." Now you have to guess whether the software has really loaded or not before you start usi…

Eh, in a case like this, without the 30 second “assume loaded” timeout, the system would be forever stuck in the loading screen for those impacted by the bugs. Sometimes it is better for your users to be optimistic that the system did indeed load.

Re: Why did Windows 7 log on slower for months if you had a solid color background?

#23

Post by cosmicgadget »

analog31 wrote: post #13

This relates to something that might have started around that time: The practice of displaying the splash screen for a finite time period, then showing the user environment before the software was fully started . It was suspected that both OS's and apps were doing this, because people notice when "the app takes too long to load." Now you have to guess whether the software has really loaded or not before you start usi…

Or, in the corporate information systems world, we have to wait for the half-dozen security and monitoring systems to get done scanning memory and blocking while painstakingly logging to the clould. Only then do you get to watch a catatonic UI thread idly wait for every last piece of the underlying software to load.

Re: Why did Windows 7 log on slower for months if you had a solid color background?

#24

Post by akst »

90s_dev wrote: post #5

> Also, I tend to stick with default configurations because it makes bug filing easier. I've learned to use default configurations pretty much everywhere. It's far too much of a hassle to maintain customizations, so it's easiest to just not care. The exception is my ~50 lines of VS Code settings I have sync'd in a mysterious file somewhere that I've never seen, presumably on github's servers, but not anywhere I can s…

Even the best crafted systems, I think you'll also find there are just more synergies between different system features in the default configuration.

Re: Why did Windows 7 log on slower for months if you had a solid color background?

#25

Post by analog31 »

cowsandmilk wrote: post #21
analog31 wrote: post #13

This relates to something that might have started around that time: The practice of displaying the splash screen for a finite time period, then showing the user environment before the software was fully started . It was suspected that both OS's and apps were doing this, because people notice when "the app takes too long to load." Now you have to guess whether the software has really loaded or not before you start usi…

Eh, in a case like this, without the 30 second “assume loaded” timeout, the system would be forever stuck in the loading screen for those impacted by the bugs. Sometimes it is better for your users to be optimistic that the system did indeed load.

Of course I'm not your typical user, but I'd rather see the error log.

Re: Why did Windows 7 log on slower for months if you had a solid color background?

#26

Post by analog31 »

cosmicgadget wrote: post #23
analog31 wrote: post #13

This relates to something that might have started around that time: The practice of displaying the splash screen for a finite time period, then showing the user environment before the software was fully started . It was suspected that both OS's and apps were doing this, because people notice when "the app takes too long to load." Now you have to guess whether the software has really loaded or not before you start usi…

Or, in the corporate information systems world, we have to wait for the half-dozen security and monitoring systems to get done scanning memory and blocking while painstakingly logging to the clould. Only then do you get to watch a catatonic UI thread idly wait for every last piece of the underlying software to load.

Yes and everything hangs because the security software is the last to load.

Re: Why did Windows 7 log on slower for months if you had a solid color background?

#27

Post by 90s_dev »

squigz wrote: post #11
90s_dev wrote: post #5

> Also, I tend to stick with default configurations because it makes bug filing easier. I've learned to use default configurations pretty much everywhere. It's far too much of a hassle to maintain customizations, so it's easiest to just not care. The exception is my ~50 lines of VS Code settings I have sync'd in a mysterious file somewhere that I've never seen, presumably on github's servers, but not anywhere I can s…

> It's far too much of a hassle to maintain customizations Is it? The vast majority of the time, I change settings/set things up the way I want, and then... leave them for literally years. Hell, I can directly restore a backup I have of Sublime Text from years ago and my customizations will work.

Most of the time, yes. I maintained my vimrc for maybe 10-15 years before I gave up on it.

The hard part of maintaining a config is that there's no such thing as cost-free usage, it always takes a mental toll to change a config, to learn a new config, to remember which configs are in use and what they do, to backup configs, or at least to setup and maintain a config-auto-backup flow.

By far, the easiest mental model is just learning how everything works out of the box, and getting used to it. Then again, sometimes what people want is to do things the hard way for its own sake. That's probably part of why I kept going back to C over and over for so many years.

Re: Why did Windows 7 log on slower for months if you had a solid color background?

#28

Post by mattnewton »

cowsandmilk wrote: post #21
analog31 wrote: post #13

This relates to something that might have started around that time: The practice of displaying the splash screen for a finite time period, then showing the user environment before the software was fully started . It was suspected that both OS's and apps were doing this, because people notice when "the app takes too long to load." Now you have to guess whether the software has really loaded or not before you start usi…

Eh, in a case like this, without the 30 second “assume loaded” timeout, the system would be forever stuck in the loading screen for those impacted by the bugs. Sometimes it is better for your users to be optimistic that the system did indeed load.

Then maybe they would have caught the error in a preview release / QA

Re: Why did Windows 7 log on slower for months if you had a solid color background?

#29

Post by 90s_dev »

optymizer wrote: post #15
squigz wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's far too much of a hassle to maintain customizations Is it? The vast majority of the time, I change settings/set things up the way I want, and then... leave them for literally years. Hell, I can directly restore a backup I have of Sublime Text from years ago and my customizations will work.

It is. I used to customize everything. On Windows 95/98/2000/XP - custom cursors, themes, icon packs, custom Windows loading screen, the works. When I used KDE (and Gnome for a while) and compiz came out, I enjoyed flaming windows. Same story - custom icon packs, make grub menu look nice, hell, custom kernels compiled for my CPU, etc. Somewhere along the way I lost interest in customizing the OS. These days I routine…

Yes, I have the same history customizing everything! From Windows 3.11 to XP to Linux, and then giving up because life gets busy.

On the note of programming not being fun anymore, that's exactly why I'm making my secret project that I hope to release very very soon, maybe in a week or so. I want to make programming fun again, in a similar way that pico8 did, but x100.

Re: Why did Windows 7 log on slower for months if you had a solid color background?

#30

Post by squigz »

90s_dev wrote: post #29
optymizer wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is. I used to customize everything. On Windows 95/98/2000/XP - custom cursors, themes, icon packs, custom Windows loading screen, the works. When I used KDE (and Gnome for a while) and compiz came out, I enjoyed flaming windows. Same story - custom icon packs, make grub menu look nice, hell, custom kernels compiled for my CPU, etc. Somewhere along the way I lost interest in customizing the OS. These days I routine…

Yes, I have the same history customizing everything! From Windows 3.11 to XP to Linux, and then giving up because life gets busy. On the note of programming not being fun anymore, that's exactly why I'm making my secret project that I hope to release very very soon, maybe in a week or so. I want to make programming fun again, in a similar way that pico8 did, but x100.

> It is. I used to customize everything. On Windows 95/98/2000/XP - custom cursors, themes, icon packs, custom Windows loading screen, the works.

> I have the same history customizing everything! ... then giving up because life gets busy.

I think this might be why some people have such different experiences. I don't try to customize "everything" - just what needs to be. Like, yeah, I would expect it to be difficult to maintain random Explorer customizations. I would not expect it to be difficult to maintain customization for a popular IDE.

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