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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?

#291

Post by MindSpunk »

anthk wrote: post #285
ryandrake wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The second.

No, not really. Everything is just rasterized triangles now, but whether they're textured or not is up to the shader your using.

A non-textured triangle will be faster than a textured one as it can just return a literal in the pixel shader instead of wasting time sampling a texture for each pixel.

However a single texture sample is so cheap on modern hardware that a specialized path for solid colors wouldn't be worth the complexity in a 2D setting. It's fast enough.

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

#292

Post by bmicraft »

queenkjuul wrote: post #178
cogman10 wrote: post #174

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

If you think that then don't install everything under the sun or choose a better distro. You can just install only Plasma Desktop, Doplhin and the handful of utilities you actually use, you know?

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

#293

Post by tmtvl »

LastMuel wrote: post #150
greenavocado wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Why? KDE is awesome.

No, KDE is KDE. Awesome is awesome. You can use awesome as the window manager for KDE (I have in the past), but you can do that with GNOME, Xfce, or LXQt as well.

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

#294

Post by mike_hearn »

chii wrote: post #288
mike_hearn wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, today I spent a lot of time waiting for some slow software that I wrote and maintain, a program that helps ship large desktop apps that use JVM or Electron. It can do native apps too but nearly nobody writes those. So I guess I both feel and create your pain in several directions. Why is my software slow? Partly because the task is inherently intensive. Partly because I use an old Intel MacBook that throttles i…

> People complain to me about various things, performance isn't one of them. which is fine, and you are doing the absolutely correct thing regarding fixing what's being complained about. But the complaints i keep hearing (and having myself) is that most apps are quite slow, and has been increasingly growing slower over time as updates arrives - mobile phones in particular.

I think this reflects a shift towards all software depending on a remote database, more than some change in programmer attitudes or bad software in general.

Win 9x era software relied entirely on files for sharing, and there was no real notion of conflict resolution or collaboration beyond that. If you were lucky the program would hold a Windows file lock on a shared drive exported over a LAN using SMB and so anyone else who tried to edit a file whilst you'd gone to lunch would get a locking error. Reference data was updated every couple of years when you bought a new version of the app.

This was unworkable for anything but the simplest and tiniest of apps, hence the continued popularity of mainframe terminals well into this era. And the meaning of "app" was different: it almost always meant productivity app on Win 9x, whereas today it almost always means a frontend to a business service.

Performance of apps over the network can be astoundingly great when some care is taken, but it will never be as snappy as something that's running purely locally, written in C++ and which doesn't care about portability, bug count or feature velocity.

There are ways to make things faster and win back some of that performance, in particular with better DALs on the server side, but we can't go backwards to the Win 9x way of doing things.

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

#295

Post by 47282847 »

Suppafly wrote: post #222
greenavocado wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Evangelizing KDE is not something I care about

>Evangelizing KDE is not something I care about This, sometimes it's enough for things to just work as you expect so you can do your actual work. I don't really understand why so many people are unpaid part time evangelizers.

Personally, I want projects I like to survive, and drawing attention to them is one way to attempt to contribute to that, for not-exclusively-but-primarily egoistic reasoning.

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

#296

Post by anthk »

ryandrake wrote: post #260
eadmund wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> KDE used to be the "bloated" desktop That’s not my recollection. I believe that the non-free license you mention was the major factor, in addition to the fact that KDE was written in C++ at a time when the free software community still preferred to write software primarily in C. GNOME was written using a free software toolkit, and it was written in C, and it was associated with the FSF.

I distinctly recall people criticizing C++ programs as "bloated" and slow compared to pure C programs.

It depends. KDE3 under Debian was much faster than Fedora Core with Gnome 2.

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

#297

Post by cornholio »

anonymars wrote: post #245
anonymars wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might be due to phantom/imperceptible input. I have this with a bunch of similar flight sim peripherals. I ended up getting one of those USB hubs with switches to disable the ports. That was a saga in itself: it had a firmware issue where 3 of the 7 ports didn't work right. Apparently it's two 4-port hubs in a trenchcoat. They had a firmware update but apparently it had a virus in the loader app so they pulled it,…

My absolute favorite, though, is my monitor. Alienware OLED. But their stupid app, which installs itself automatically thanks to that well-thought-through Windows feature nowadays despite my removing it -- if that's installed, the monitor won't go to sleep. Which is really great for an OLED monitor. That one, it seems if I disable the "software device" in device manager, it stops installing itself. But how do you rel…

Is it displaying some low luminosity logo or the time of day? I think this is common on OLED mobile devices and does not actually deplete the screen. Unlike led backlight, where the pixels need to actively fight the illumination source that slowly ages just to display a black screen, in OLED as long as the pixel is not lit to a significant level it will not deplete that pixel. Displaying full black is "free" even if the monitor is turned on, and keeping power on in solid state electronics is generally better than thermal cycling a dozen times per day.

Still, it's a feature I will definitely turn off first thing; off means off, if I want "full black on" I will set a black screensaver.

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

#299

Post by anonymars »

cornholio wrote: post #297
anonymars wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My absolute favorite, though, is my monitor. Alienware OLED. But their stupid app, which installs itself automatically thanks to that well-thought-through Windows feature nowadays despite my removing it -- if that's installed, the monitor won't go to sleep. Which is really great for an OLED monitor. That one, it seems if I disable the "software device" in device manager, it stops installing itself. But how do you rel…

Is it displaying some low luminosity logo or the time of day? I think this is common on OLED mobile devices and does not actually deplete the screen. Unlike led backlight, where the pixels need to actively fight the illumination source that slowly ages just to display a black screen, in OLED as long as the pixel is not lit to a significant level it will not deplete that pixel. Displaying full black is "free" even if…

Nope, just the monitor not going to sleep, cheerfully beaming the lock screen at full bore to an empty room. Sheer madness.

Some threads:

https://www.dell.com/community/en/conversations/alienware-de...

https://www.dell.com/community/en/conversations/alienware-de...

https://www.dell.com/community/en/conversations/alienware-de...

https://www.reddit.com/r/Alienware/comments/s8m4yx/alienware...

https://www.reddit.com/r/Alienware/comments/uon0kq/alienware...

Also worth noting that the helpless suggestions to "why, just turn the monitor off" would prevent the OLED maintenance from running (since that runs automatically when the monitor goes to sleep)

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

#300

Post by aftbit »

Teckla wrote: post #257
aftbit wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

ZZ will save the file (if there are changes) and quit. Try it as an alternative to :wq.

I've rebound mine too. ZZ saves without quitting, while Q quits.
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