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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?

#201

Post by herbst »

greenavocado wrote: post #147
herbst wrote: 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

I am using windows only for rekordbox. I tried a few like that like tiny10 but in the end I would always run into driver issues.

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

#202

Post by Vilian »

oblio wrote: post #117
cornholio wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I just use hibernate instead. Marginally longer start up time and no more worries. For shorter periods I just leave it on (like when taking the laptop to a meeting room).

Hibernate is a lot harder to make work correctly, and can lead to problems in more niche cases, so it's not a guarantee

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

#203

Post by wlesieutre »

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…

Also in macOS recently, I've set a solid color and it has reverted itself to some default forest photo several times.

I suspect this is related to the System Preferences rebuild, since it's worked fine for 20+ years of OS X before that.

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

#204

Post by wizzwizz4 »

analog31 wrote: post #26
cosmicgadget wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ctrl+Alt+Delete, log off, then mash space to cancel the logoff. Kills the security software while leaving the rest of the system running. (Windows provides APIs to prevent this, but nobody writing "security" software uses them: in the Age of AI, I expect this to get even worse.

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

#205

Post by kjkjadksj »

whynotmaybe wrote: post #138
myfonj wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don’t know if that would do it or just return your dark current image.

The best thing to do is just take a file same as your screen resolution into your favorite image editor and fill it with actual true black. Save as png and send to phone.

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

#207

Post by tremon »

RajT88 wrote: post #187
sixothree wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love to store documents in the My Documents folder if applications actually had respect for me. Windows should never allow an application to just dump stuff in the Documents or Desktop folder without my permission.

Don't get me started... Office these days adds friction if you want to save documents anywhere but the Documents folder (where they get uploaded to OneDrive if you have it set up). They've also disabled auto-save if you don't have the documents backed up by OneDrive, which is the most egregious for me.

Office has never had auto-save for local documents; it only had (and still has) periodic recovery saves. The primary reason they added auto-save for cloud documents is to facilitate multiplayer online editing.

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

#208

Post by kjkjadksj »

caseyohara wrote: post #151
chii wrote: 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...

> And this is the so-called responsive design... I’m not sure if this was meant to be a pun, but “responsive design” has nothing to do with how quickly a UI loads. It’s about adapting to different screen sizes.

Plain html could do that too. People forget the ancient knowledge.

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

#209

Post by kjkjadksj »

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…

It is really amazing how big gui flagship apps like office suite or adobe suite seem slower than they did in 2001. And really they don’t do anything different than these old tools maybe a few extra functions (like content aware fill in ps) but the bread and butter is largely the same. So why is it so slow?

It is almost like they realized users are happy to wait 30-60 seconds for an app to open in 2001 and kept that expectation even as the task remained the same and computers got an order of magnitude more powerful in that time.

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

#210

Post by kjkjadksj »

skydhash wrote: post #144
oblio wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That 10% left of adware is heavy stuff
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