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Windows 7 boots slower if you set a solid background color

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Re: Windows 7 boots slower if you set a solid background color

#111

Post by adamzochowski »

gulikoza wrote: post #24
PlunderBunny wrote: post #8

Hands up all the people that used computers before desktop pictures were a thing and still set the desktop to a solid colour because “it will draw faster and use less memory.”

Windows before some version (maybe before XP?) only supported BMP wallpapers. BMP is uncompressed, a 1024x768 24-bit BMP is 2.25MB. That could be 7% of the 32MB system RAM and if the image got paged out - you were looking at it being redrawn line by line...yeah, I'm not doing that :)

BMP supports compression, but its basic, RLE style, so only line art compresses well.

Re: Windows 7 boots slower if you set a solid background color

#112

Post by butlike »

quickthrowman wrote: post #7
butlike wrote: post #4

What was the name of that blog post from the old Windows dev? He had some interesting articles like how setting the datetime in the clock fubar'd older windows filesystem items or something?

The Old New Thing by Raymond Chen https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/

Thanks!

Re: Windows 7 boots slower if you set a solid background color

#113

Post by Melatonic »

ack_complete wrote: post #87
gulikoza wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows before some version (maybe before XP?) only supported BMP wallpapers. BMP is uncompressed, a 1024x768 24-bit BMP is 2.25MB. That could be 7% of the 32MB system RAM and if the image got paged out - you were looking at it being redrawn line by line...yeah, I'm not doing that :)

This was a problem even for systems with more RAM, because that background bitmap was always a tempting target for the memory manager looking to page out long idle memory. It was exacerbated by the aggressive disk cache, which could cause even programs that didn't allocate much memory directly to swap out the background by doing enough regular buffered I/O.

Huge performance increase I still do (probably with negligible effects) was to manually set the disk cache (or whatever it's called - ram using HDD) to a set amount (usually double the ram). Letting windows manage it meant it was constantly changing in size and moving around the drive and with spinning disks killed performance. Also made defragging often mkre necessary. And of course disabling system restore.

I still do it out of habit with SSDs and I imagine it's mostly unnecessary but never ran into issues. I figure at worst it may increase the life of the SSD

Re: Windows 7 boots slower if you set a solid background color

#114

Post by Melatonic »

EvanAnderson wrote: post #43
PlunderBunny wrote: post #8

Hands up all the people that used computers before desktop pictures were a thing and still set the desktop to a solid colour because “it will draw faster and use less memory.”

Sort of. I set solid colors on Windows machines because I'm frequently connecting to them over low bandwidth, high latency links using RDP. Pictures are slow even with bitmap caching (though my pure and refined hatred is saved for apps and websites that do "fade" and animation effects in the UI, particularly native apps that ignore the OS settings for these "features"). The decision to set the .DEFAULT profile wallpa…

Good practice but RDP should automatically not be showing the desktop background anyways (depending on RDP settings). You could also set a desktop background if you like and manually tell RDP to never show the background of the system your connected to.

Re: Windows 7 boots slower if you set a solid background color

#115

Post by Melatonic »

omoikane wrote: post #45
PlunderBunny wrote: post #8

Hands up all the people that used computers before desktop pictures were a thing and still set the desktop to a solid colour because “it will draw faster and use less memory.”

I still use a solid black background. I rarely see my background anyways. I do have a picture for my login screen though.

Good login screen background is key - agreed here. Depends on the system for me - if it's something powerful with many monitors I love a good multi monitor background (where each one is different but a similar theme).

Re: Windows 7 boots slower if you set a solid background color

#116

Post by lousken »

OptionOfT wrote: post #75
LeoPanthera wrote: post #2

This reminds me of how in Windows 95, installers would complete quicker if you constantly moved the mouse, but would take longer if it was still.

The opposite happens in CMD on Windows, at least in the past. Applications that wrote a lot to the logscreen were slowed down by it. While writing to stdout is buffered, it seems that the rendering itself runs in the same thread as the application. Making a selection freezes the terminal and this stops the rendering, allowing the application to run much faster. Removing the selection (by pressing escape) rerendered t…

i always thought freezing the terminal causes a pause of the app as well, is it just the rendering?

Re: Windows 7 boots slower if you set a solid background color

#117

Post by Melatonic »

I'm not sure why I do this still (there was an old reason - and it could be this boot time thing) but when I want a solid background in windows I always create a 1x1 pixel image of the colour I want (usually a very dark grey) and then set that as the background and tell windows to tile it.

This still produces a solid desktop background of course.

There are so many little quirks to windows and I've been using it so long I know there used to be a good reason to do this - vaguely I remember it being related to minimising RAM in something like windows 2000 or XP. Probably from the days when I was trying to squeeze every ounce of performance out of hand me down parts to play some old game.

Re: Windows 7 boots slower if you set a solid background color

#118

Post by Melatonic »

mrguyorama wrote: post #5
bkummel wrote: post #3

This seems random and contra intuitive. The article is also confusing, containing a section on how to set a solid color as a background, while that is actually what causes the issue...

No, the workaround is, instead of telling windows to "draw my background as this solid color", you tell it "draw my background as this image (which happens to be a solid color)", ie Windows can paint any image to your background without delay. From the other workaround, ie edit this registry entry, the delay is directly related to some portion of the Windows session system timing out and switching to a different sess…

I've been doing this for years (1x1 pixel image set to tiled). I assumed it was no longer necessary but figured it wouldn't hurt.

Do you have a link to the thing about the session system timing out ? Curious about how this works behind the hood even if it is patched (especially since sometimes windows bugs will rarely come back in very niche specific situations)

Re: Windows 7 boots slower if you set a solid background color

#119

Post by Saris »

a2128 wrote: post #33

Over on the Linux side, I installed Vanilla OS recently and it has a Samba service (nmbd.service) as a bootup dependency, which waits for a non-loopback IPv4 interface to be available. So if you're on a laptop which is not connected to WiFi, it will just hang for 90 seconds on the bootup screen before systemd decides that service has failed to start and moves on

I never understood why it waits so long, surely maybe 2-3 seconds would be plenty as a default.

Re: Windows 7 boots slower if you set a solid background color

#120

Post by EvanAnderson »

Melatonic wrote: post #114
EvanAnderson wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sort of. I set solid colors on Windows machines because I'm frequently connecting to them over low bandwidth, high latency links using RDP. Pictures are slow even with bitmap caching (though my pure and refined hatred is saved for apps and websites that do "fade" and animation effects in the UI, particularly native apps that ignore the OS settings for these "features"). The decision to set the .DEFAULT profile wallpa…

Good practice but RDP should automatically not be showing the desktop background anyways (depending on RDP settings). You could also set a desktop background if you like and manually tell RDP to never show the background of the system your connected to.

I push down a solid color background w/ Group Policy everywhere I can.

re: the RDP client settings - I can certainly control that. I just usually forget to. The default "Experience" setting for Microsoft's RDP client is "Detection connection quality automatically" and it has a much more optimistic view of "connection quality" than I do.

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