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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?

#161

Post by zerkten »

kn0where wrote: post #59
Enginerrrd wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Similar with google docs, if you share a link to a doc, even if the doc is restricted access, anyone can see the thumbnail icon with the contents of page 1.

Product managers will decide to show the thumbnail in situations because it results in more click throughs. In many cases they'll have done their research to know that many customers take steps to restrict what they share (think profitable but conservative companies) but will choose to show the thumbnails anyway.

Some customers will push back and have enough leverage to get an exception, but the default answer will be that this can't be disabled. You'll have some sales engineer challenged about the product behavior as part of an RFP and they'll try to convince you that nothing is leaked while knowing the financial opportunity would be much larger with these customers, if there was more concern for the customer.

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

#162

Post by phkahler »

This is the kind of problem that can be prevented by using "better" coding patterns. Not to say it will be prevented, but that some ways people like to structure code are more prone to these kinds of bugs. I quoted the word "better" because I work with a competent but less experienced guy that tends to write more complex code, or what some claim is just a different style than I would prefer. I make claims that "this way is better" and it's often very difficult to articulate why it's better. Sometimes I am convincing, other times not... I'm not immune to these kinds of bugs either, but I shudder to think I might one day inherit this other guys code and a collection of these weird bugs.

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

#163

Post by mike_hearn »

72deluxe wrote: post #105
arkh wrote: 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.

Yes I am baffled how modern apps are painfully slow. Everything seems to include a Chrome Embedded Framework and therefore have an entire browser running. There is sadly a generation of people who grew up after .net was introduced who think it's perfectly reasonable for a VM spooling up as part of an app load or loading a browser is fine too, and have no idea how speedy Windows 95 used to be, or how loading an app to…

Let's not go too far with the rose tinted glasses. Win95 apps are speedy if you run them on modern hardware but at the time they were all dog slow because the average Win95 machine was swapping like crazy.

Loading apps on it definitely did not take one second. The prevalence of splash screens was a testament to that. Practically every app had one whereas today they're rare. Even browsers had multi-second splash screens back then. Microsoft was frequently suspected to be cheating because their apps started so fast you could only see the splash for a second or two, and nobody could work out how they did it. In reality they had written a custom linker that minimized the number of disk seeks required, and everything was disk seek constrained so that made a huge difference.

Delphi apps were easier to create than if you used Visual C++/MFC but compared to modern tooling it wasn't that good. I say that as a someone who grew up with Delphi. Things have got better. In particular they got a lot more reliable. Software back then crashed all the time.

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

#164

Post by jameshart »

phkahler wrote: post #162

This is the kind of problem that can be prevented by using "better" coding patterns. Not to say it will be prevented, but that some ways people like to structure code are more prone to these kinds of bugs. I quoted the word "better" because I work with a competent but less experienced guy that tends to write more complex code, or what some claim is just a different style than I would prefer. I make claims that "this…

Let’s be honest this is the kind of thing that can happen to anyone.

We all like to think we have picked up habits that immunize us from certain kinds of error but large software systems are complex and bugs happen.

The number of people in here taking ‘Raymond Chen tells an anecdote about the time a dumb bug shipped in Windows and was fixed two weeks later’ as an indictment of Microsoft’s engineering culture is frankly embarrassing. Trading war stories is how we all get better.

It would be better for us all if culturally, the reaction to a developer telling a story of how they once shipped a stupid bug were for everyone to reply with examples of worse stuff they’ve done themselves, not to smugly nod and say ‘ah yes, I am too smart to make such a mistake’.

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

#165

Post by aftbit »

90s_dev wrote: post #27
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.

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…

Except then when I type ":Wq" by mistake, I get an error instead of vim doing what I expect. This happens about 20 times a day for me. One line of config maintenance is well worth the end of this daily annoyance.

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

#166

Post by bluedino »

Machines were often so slow back then, 30 second logins were 'normal' (or maybe even quick), especially once you load a bunch of crap like AV and other enterprise crap.

If I had dollar for every minute of my life I spent troubleshooting random group policy quirks during my previous life as a sysadmin...

> Personally, I use a solid color background. It was the default in Windows 95,¹ and I’ve stuck with that bluish-green background color ever since.

My thoughts exactly, but I think it goes back to the Mac LC's we used in a school computer lab, and the palette of colors you could have with 16-bit graphics was so vast compared to the 16 color PC's I was used to.

Plus, you always have so much stuff open you're never going to see your wallpaper anyway. That's what screensaver are (were) for that rotate through a folder full of images.

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

#167

Post by conductr »

theandrewbailey wrote: post #123
fhd2 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like to joke that Microsoft stuff is always 80%. Works very well for the obvious use cases, but then you are bound to run into weird issues as soon as you run into some edge case they haven't covered. Makes me think it must have something to do with their corporate culture and how they work, since their developers, to my knowledge, never had a reputation for being weak. Maybe it's just because they have such a giga…

> Maybe it's just because they have such a gigantic user base for everything they do, that 80% is the best business value. I was thinking about something similar recently. 80% of features take 20% of the time. For the hobby stuff I program, I want to make the best use of my time, so I skip the last 20% of features to make more room for stuff that matters. I call it PDD: Pareto-Driven Development. Looks like you think…

They have time and resources though. I think what you say makes sense for release. At some point you just need to stop adding things and release what you could, even at their scale this is true. The pattern I see is they just never polish things after releasing them. Although, in theory, the whole team is still there available. Internally I think the culture is they immediately look to the next version. Instead of polishing what users have available, tackling the 20%, etc. So in a sense, they stay busy constantly building just the 80% part over and over again (eg, right now I imagine they’re busy porting the 80 to Windows 12 or whatever is next for them, which is probably a big rewrite because the like to change the entire style guide on each release)

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

#168

Post by CRConrad »

RajT88 wrote: post #157
vlowrian wrote: post #62

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 too prefer a solid color. However, I've noticed, there's not much point in changing it. Showing the desktop is a waste of screen real estate because of the generations of abuse of desktop shortcuts. Even if you are careful, it becomes a cluttered wasteland (on Windows anyways). I just learned to never use the desktop for anything and always have windows up on various monitors.

Windows 10 has a setting to allow you to choose if it should show or hide desktop icons. Dunno about 11.

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

#169

Post by CRConrad »

lozf wrote: post #149
AHTERIX5000 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

God forbid an input box in a GUI config dialog.

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

#170

Post by bee_rider »

RajT88 wrote: post #157
vlowrian wrote: post #62

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 too prefer a solid color. However, I've noticed, there's not much point in changing it. Showing the desktop is a waste of screen real estate because of the generations of abuse of desktop shortcuts. Even if you are careful, it becomes a cluttered wasteland (on Windows anyways). I just learned to never use the desktop for anything and always have windows up on various monitors.

I thought Windows programs generally asked if you want to make a desktop icon for them. (But I only use Windows as a video game console).
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