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

devblogs.microsoft.com

131–140 of 311 posts

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

#131

As someone who prefers a solid color background, I’m always surprised by how often this simple preference leads me into bizarre rabbit holes. Some additional examples beyond the OP: - In the latest macOS, trying to set a custom solid color background just gives you a blinding white screen (see: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/256029958?sortBy=rank ). - GNOME removed all UI controls for setting solid color backgr…

Last time I used an Android (Galaxy) phone, to have a solid pitch-black background (which I thought made sense for modern phone displays energy-wise, besides looking pretty swell), I had to download — yes, D-O-W-N-L-O-A-D — some black image from some "Galaxy Store" thing or whatnot to achieve that. It was free, but it seemed like an exception there.

Something that should be a default option, or a single-tap switch in settings, turned into a chore consisting of a period of agonising disbelief, doubt, denial, search, and eventually bitter acceptance.

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

#132

As someone who prefers a solid color background, I’m always surprised by how often this simple preference leads me into bizarre rabbit holes. Some additional examples beyond the OP: - In the latest macOS, trying to set a custom solid color background just gives you a blinding white screen (see: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/256029958?sortBy=rank ). - GNOME removed all UI controls for setting solid color backgr…

> GNOME removed all UI controls for setting solid color backgrounds, but still technically supports it if you manually set a bunch of config keys — which seem to randomly change between versions

There's the peak GNOME experience.

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

#133
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…

Agreed. I had a professor once who would say “The defaults were put there by people who probably know more about the software than you”. As long as you understand what the defaults are doing sometimes it’s more hassle messing with every option under the sun.

> Agreed. I had a professor once who would say “The defaults were put there by people who probably know more about the software than you”.

He surely didn't use any Microsoft product. /s

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

#134
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…

The most annoying one is that Windows machines have lost the ability for deep sleep. Laptops that slept perfectly 5 years ago are now left as 24/7 zombies, with the CPU, fans and hard disks running non stop. I'm certain that some idiotic change just like the ones suggested in the article destroyed this perfectly working feature, and nobody is bothered to fix it because it would impact the latest harebrained scheme to…

Windows kept waking up my old laptop at random times, draining the battery. Which lead to some embarrassment when I had replaced the default sounds with a comedy portal pack, and my backpack randomly yelled that the core temperature was critical when the battery nearly died

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

#135

Or why your software should never use arbitrary timeouts. Without the 30s timeout this bug would have been caught and fixed before release.

I wonder what happens if some operation genuinly takes more than 30s to complete in sone cases? I'm sure the system handles it gracefully. /s

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

#136

As someone who prefers a solid color background, I’m always surprised by how often this simple preference leads me into bizarre rabbit holes. Some additional examples beyond the OP: - In the latest macOS, trying to set a custom solid color background just gives you a blinding white screen (see: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/256029958?sortBy=rank ). - GNOME removed all UI controls for setting solid color backgr…

> GNOME removed all UI controls for setting solid color backgrounds, but still technically supports it if you manually set a bunch of config keys — which seem to randomly change between versions There's the peak GNOME experience.

Or the display sleep menu which offers choices like 1, 2, 5, 10, 15 and 30 min timeout but no more than that unless you use external config editor.

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

#137
post #88

Offtopic I really liked the auto-refreshing "Windows Spotlight" wallpaper on logon screen. I even wrote a script to sync it as my desktop wallpaper. But on my Win10 it stopped working idk why, so I wrote a script to download Bing Image of the Day instead: https://blog.est.im/2025/stdout-03

11 can set spotlight as the desktop wallpaper.

but is not supported on millions of otherwise working systems.

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

#138
post #131

As someone who prefers a solid color background, I’m always surprised by how often this simple preference leads me into bizarre rabbit holes. Some additional examples beyond the OP: - In the latest macOS, trying to set a custom solid color background just gives you a blinding white screen (see: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/256029958?sortBy=rank ). - GNOME removed all UI controls for setting solid color backgr…

Last time I used an Android (Galaxy) phone, to have a solid pitch-black background (which I thought made sense for modern phone displays energy-wise, besides looking pretty swell), I had to download — yes, D-O-W-N-L-O-A-D — some black image from some "Galaxy Store" thing or whatnot to achieve that. It was free, but it seemed like an exception there. Something that should be a default option, or a single-tap switch in…

I had to take a picture with my finger on the camera to have a black image to use as background.

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

#139

As someone who prefers a solid color background, I’m always surprised by how often this simple preference leads me into bizarre rabbit holes. Some additional examples beyond the OP: - In the latest macOS, trying to set a custom solid color background just gives you a blinding white screen (see: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/256029958?sortBy=rank ). - GNOME removed all UI controls for setting solid color backgr…

I checked in KDE, since I'm generally confused as to why it's not more popular now: in the wallpaper settings you choose `wallpaper type: plain color` and it gives you a color picker to set it.

It also shows you the screen you set it for, and a boolean to set it for all screens at once.

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