Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

devblogs.microsoft.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 311 posts

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

#31

Post by ffsm8 »

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.

Not only do they forbid devs to use Linux on their dev machines, they then proceed with cb.exe etc. Nothing shows how they value your time quiet as much as these artificial slowdowns they love to introduce. (Along with gigantic privacy issues, as it allows the employer to essentially look at a live feed of your desktop whenever they want)

I could understand it if your device needed special access (VPN to prod etc), but you usually can't do that either from the dev machines - and need to first connect to a virtual machine (via browser or rdp) to be able to do that...

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

#32

Post by necovek »

It's funny to see this: after avoiding the Windows world for the last 25 years, back in the corporate world in the last few, I see this pattern with Microsoft tools all the time.

Teams not loading due to security issues, but notifications coming through with full content of messages. Ability to type a handful of words in cloud version of Word (or paste full documents) before security check catches up and requires me to set up a sensitivity label. Etc.

It mostly tells me about MS doing very bad software architecture for web apps, though apparently the desktop apps are not immune to it either.

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

#33

Post by progmetaldev »

squigz wrote: post #30
90s_dev wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

I am with you, customizing your daily tools and saving those configurations is far different from customizing every visual element of your operating system. Being able to reproduce your environment is definitely a worthy goal, but at the same time, I think you'd be limiting yourself by not configuring your production software to your own liking/most-efficient way you work.

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

#34

Post by Enginerrrd »

necovek wrote: post #32

It's funny to see this: after avoiding the Windows world for the last 25 years, back in the corporate world in the last few, I see this pattern with Microsoft tools all the time. Teams not loading due to security issues, but notifications coming through with full content of messages. Ability to type a handful of words in cloud version of Word (or paste full documents) before security check catches up and requires me…

It's not just MS. I think they might have fixed it now, but my personal favorite was when Google photos would send me a notification with a preview of an AI generated album of my photos they made for me even though the app did not now, nor ever have permissions (on Android) to look at said photos. And it too would then "catch up" and ask permission to see my files and I'd say "no" and then the preview would go away.

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

#35

Post by suyula »

ryao wrote: post #8
sightofcorbie wrote: post #2

“Comfort food”. That’s so funny. I still use motif window manager with steelblue4 desktop and wheat xterm background since aix into Linux. That was my first default in 1989 college and nothing has improved since. (Gnome, kde and the like make me want to upchuck).

What will you do when you want to use a 4K monitor? This is not to be dismissive. I am genuinely curious if HiDPI works on motif.

I can't speak for Motif but Fluxbox works fine on my 4K monitor

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

#36

Post by Nition »

I've noticed a current problem in Win 11 where if you start your PC with the monitor off, let it get to the login screen, then turn the monitor on, you get a terribly low-res version of your login window background. I suspect it's taking some fallback default resolution like 800x600 and serving up an "optimised" version of the background for that res, then not updating it.

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

#37

Post by kirenida »

sightofcorbie wrote: post #2

“Comfort food”. That’s so funny. I still use motif window manager with steelblue4 desktop and wheat xterm background since aix into Linux. That was my first default in 1989 college and nothing has improved since. (Gnome, kde and the like make me want to upchuck).

"Nothing has improved since". That's so funny.

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

#38

Post by nothrabannosir »

TheDong wrote: post #20
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…

Reproducible self-contained configurations give most of the same benefit for bug filing. Just your regular reminder that nix is good actually. "I have a bug, you can get a full VM that reproduces it with 'nixos-rebuild build-vm --flake "github:user/repo#test-vm" && ./result/bin/run-*-vm'" And the code producing that VM isn't just a binary blob that's a security nightmare, it's plain nix expressions anyone can read (b…

(Would it be pedantic of me to say that I receive my fair share of bug reports on nix code I maintain, and when someone sends me their entire nixosConfig the very first thing I do is punt it back with a "can you please create a minimal reproducible configuration"? :D but your point stands. I think. I like to think.)

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

#39

Post by chii »

Enginerrrd wrote: post #34
necovek wrote: post #32

It's funny to see this: after avoiding the Windows world for the last 25 years, back in the corporate world in the last few, I see this pattern with Microsoft tools all the time. Teams not loading due to security issues, but notifications coming through with full content of messages. Ability to type a handful of words in cloud version of Word (or paste full documents) before security check catches up and requires me…

It's not just MS. I think they might have fixed it now, but my personal favorite was when Google photos would send me a notification with a preview of an AI generated album of my photos they made for me even though the app did not now, nor ever have permissions (on Android) to look at said photos. And it too would then "catch up" and ask permission to see my files and I'd say "no" and then the preview would go away.

The team that wrote the preview portion of the app is a different team to the one that wrote the permission requesting part. They communicate asynchronously (as a team/org, but this probably is reflected in the app's architecture!), which means the outcome is eventually consistent! But you managed to observe one of those inconsistent cases!

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

#40

Post by chii »

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…

> showing the user environment before the software was fully started.

and it has migrated to web apps today - where doing something causes the UI to show a loading/progress wheel, but it takes forever in actuality (or on start up of the webpage, you get a blank screen with placeholder bars/blurred color images etc).

And this is the so-called responsive design...

Post reply on HN