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

devblogs.microsoft.com

261–270 of 311 posts

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

#261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, that is likely it.

It's Server Core, not PE. PE is the Preinstallation Environment, used by Windows Setup and Windows Recovery.

Ah, yea, that's what it was. I might have confused it with Hiren’s BootCD as I could have swore it booted to a cmd prompt.

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

#262
post #97
post #76

To me, this falls in the category of bugs I think of as "systemic bugs" or "type bugs". If login components were passed a token, then you could make the token's destructor automatically flag that the process is done. Then this bug would be more-or-less impossible to write. Because they made it a runtime thing - "components just have to remember to do this", the code structure itself affords this bug. There was a simi…

Bad notification icons happen on Reddit all the time. I've always assumed it was just bad caching

I always assumed it was a dark pattern to get more engagement.

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

#263
post #244

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…

You know, I bought a MBP as a personal machine 6 months ago - my first Mac - and this post made me realize that I couldn't even tell you what its desktop looks like. I'm sure I saw it a few times when I was doing initial setup, but I don't remember anything about. I used to do things like set custom wallpapers, but probably around 10 years I pretty much stopped using the desktop entirely.

How do you not have a desktop? What do you see when all your applications are closed?

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

#264
When I think about it, if I hadn't lived this time, I would find it pretty hard to believe we had full-featured desktop environments in machines with paltry 8MB of memory and 50Mhz CPUs, and not only that, but we even indulged in the luxury of having bitmaps as wallpapers.

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

#265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's historic reasons. KDE used to be the "bloated" desktop way back when (I know, pretty silly and laughable now given the current state of things). That cemented Gnome/Mate into a lot of major distros as the primary DME. Ubuntu being the most famous. The QT licensing situation is also a bit of a bizarre quagmire. There are certainly people that don't like KDE for more ideological reasons. Personally, none o…

KDE still seems pretty bloated

It's not bloated, it just has lots of options. If you like someone else to decide everything for you: buy a Mac or use gnome. But KDE is not for you then. Don't try to make it into something it was never meant to be.

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

#266

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…

Maybe I'm still living in the 1990s, but isn't the graphics API call to paint a solid 2D rectangle infinitely faster than the call to blt a 2D image to the screen, with possible arbitrary scaling and clipping? Or is everything just natively textures now and we don't even have 2D drawing hardware?

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

#267
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Keep is a note taking app. However when you're inside a note (which BTW, can also be converted into checkboxes, aka very simple TODOs), Google Keep, the note taking app from search giant Google, doesn't have search functionality for that specific note. Besides the many small bugs, sometimes the missing functionality in Google apps is mind boggling.

On a asimialr vein, Microsoft's OneNote, which is of course part of the famed and expensive Office suite, still doesn't support Find and Replace. But, they do have a meticulously written official support article that suggests you can copy the text you want to replace with, and then do Find, double click the text it finds, ctrl+V, and repeat... https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/find-and-replace-...

Wow that is ridiculous. But really, OneNote is the most crusty part of the whole office suite. It's completely unfit for purpose. They don't even bother to make a web version that properly works (you get signed out every day and you can only search in one folder, not even a whole notebook)

I moved to obsidian with self hosted livesync and it's such a breath of fresh air. It actually does what it says. There's tons of plugins. The sync never drops a beat.

It's a typical example of Microsoft's solutions to be B-quality at best. An AAA level solution is always better.. Microsoft's goal is only to be not bad enough for people to drop the "included with your subscription" product and go for something actually fit for purpose.

Unfortunately I'm stuck with OneNote at work. I guess they want me to be ineffective and inefficient.

It's just annoying because I don't have any use for "office" applications but a personal knowledgebase is something that's super important to me.

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

#268

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…

Maybe I'm still living in the 1990s, but isn't the graphics API call to paint a solid 2D rectangle infinitely faster than the call to blt a 2D image to the screen, with possible arbitrary scaling and clipping? Or is everything just natively textures now and we don't even have 2D drawing hardware?

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

#269
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.

That's actually hilarious, so much high tech involved to get a dark background.

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

#270
post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

KDE still seems pretty bloated

I rather think the right word is clunky: one of the dev is attached to Server-Side Decoration/against CSD for some reason (none of his arguments make sense), so every stock app are difficult to read and taking unneeded screen space. It's just bad UX.

Are you suggesting that avoiding client-side window decorations in favor of the traditional server-side approach is bad UX?
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