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

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141–150 of 311 posts

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

#141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently acquired a ThinkStation P910 dual CPU Xeon E26xx with 64GB RAM and 1080GTX Quite a capable machine for my uses. Not supported in Windows 11. Maybe with some additional config? Can’t be bothered with something hat might turn out to be fragile and need more maintenance than I can be bothered with. That’s a young man’s gane. Ok, I’m about due to give Linux another tickle anyways. Hmm, which distro… can always…

I wouldn't go with Pop_OS with that hardware. The Nvidia GPU isn't supported by the new Nvidia driver and because System76 is hard at work writing Cosmic, their repositories are quite outdated. Support for things like Wayland is quite mediocre in the old drivers. Switching to upstream (Ubuntu) with KDE would probably be more your speed.

I recently updated Pop OS to the Cosmic Alpha and it is much more to my liking than Gnome 3 ever was. I have an older Nvidia GPU though.

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

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do have some sort of sleep but its very inefficient so Lenovo Thinkpads actually go into hibernation after an hour or so of sleep, to avoid the user waking up to an empty battery.

This has given me flashbacks. I went down this rabbit hole prepandemic with a Dell laptop I had for work at the time. I got tired of getting on the train to find my laptop dead. Back then Windows would default to a crap version of sleep but you could still disable it in the BIOS and by tweaking a couple of other settings, thus forcing it to use proper sleep. I’m pretty sure I wrote a lengthy response on HN about this…

I like PC laptops. But only the business line, so that you get sensible admin options and good hardware.

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

#143
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…

Somewhere, there is some intern commented out test for this feature.

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

#144
post #121
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or is the only solution to fix loading times in the first place? Ding! Ding! Ding! We got a winner! Yeah, maybe we could expect machines which got 40 years of Moore's law to give you an experience at least as snappy as what you got on DOS apps.

When I want to make old devs cry I send them this link[1]: https://forum.dlang.org/ I know it's very simple, I know there isn't a lot of media (and definitely no tracking or ads), but it shows what could be possible on the internet. It's just that nobody cares. [1] Yes, Hacker News is also quite good in terms of loading speed.

Private torrent trackers are generally fast too. My pet peeves is when news websites are slow, because the only content you have is 90% text.

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

#145
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

I'd be happy to get a progress wheel, half the time it is a blank page.

There used to be a loading progress by the browser, but today, it’s when it’s done that the real loading start.

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

#146

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.

Those of us that use KDE don't necessarily broadcast it

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

#147
post #102

I've spent a few hours reading and installing random software I never heard of before to get my windows machine into the basic state of "I can boot it without getting heavily triggered" - Half of each boot time was wasted for a copilot 360 dialog. On every fucking boot, no copilot no office installed. Or rather copilot installed itself without notice and started to spam me - In several places the OS would show me "ne…

If you're willing to take the risk and trust the developer there is a fully prepared Windows distribution called Windows 11 24H2.3775 16in1 x64 - Integral Edition 2025.4.9 on zone94

Their other distributions are very good as well, especially for Windows XP because they bundle a lot of important drivers for old software to work correctly

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

#148
post #20
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…

[deleted]

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

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You can also use `gsettings set ...` on the CLI.

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

#150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Those of us that use KDE don't necessarily broadcast it

Why? KDE is awesome.
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