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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?

#191

Post by scblock »

bluedino wrote: post #166

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-gr…

On my fairly recent corporate laptop a 30 second login would be massively faster than my corpo-malware-ridden experience. 5 minutes to Windows 10 desktop this morning.

A similar (slightly older) laptop I own boots from fully off to the KDE desktop in 25 seconds total including typing my password.

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

#192

Post by duped »

fhd2 wrote: post #103
necovek wrote: post #32

It's funny to see this: after avoiding the Windows world for the last 25 years, back in the corporate world in the last few, I see this pattern with Microsoft tools all the time. Teams not loading due to security issues, but notifications coming through with full content of messages. Ability to type a handful of words in cloud version of Word (or paste full documents) before security check catches up and requires me…

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…

I mean Microsoft has always had a reputation for shipping bad software, what that reflects on their developer teams is up to the audience. Personally I'd say it's reflective of a bad engineering culture that doesn't care about quality or craftsmanship due to lack of an incentive to ship good software but every incentive to ship software at scale, quality be damned.

Like in this article alone, that's a change that should never be made. It's an understandable bug but it's indicative of carelessness, both managerial (how does this hold up to code review?) and QA (why is no one asking why login splashes take 30 seconds?).

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

#193

Post by duped »

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…

> Yes I am baffled how modern apps are painfully slow.

People underestimate how slow the network is, and put a network between the app and its logic to make the app itself a thin HTTP client and "application" a mess of networked servers in the cloud.

The network is your enemy, but people treat it like reading and writing to disk because it happens to be faster at their desk when they test.

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

#194

Post by hbn »

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…

On top of the news headlines being shoved in your face everywhere in Windows, they do the same with stocks, showing you trade values of random stocks in various places which I can't help but find hilarious.

I think they're trying to emulate Apple who has had stocks integration by default for years, including being alongside the other pre-installed apps like SMS and Mail on the first iPhone. I imagine Apple did it to cement themselves as a high-class lifestyle brand, even though I'm sure there was never a time where most iPhone users were doing a lot of day trading.

I wonder what percentage of Windows users rely on the stock ticker in the start menu though...

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

#196

Post by [deleted] »

lewantmontreal wrote: post #98
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…

They do have some sort of sleep but its very inefficient so Lenovo Thinkpads actually go into hibernation after an hour or so of sleep, to avoid the user waking up to an empty battery.

[deleted]

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

#197

Post by gymbeaux »

myfonj wrote: post #131
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…

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…

A black background on an AMOLED display (something Samsung Galaxy phones tended to have) would use less energy because “pitch black” on AMOLED is literally turning the underlying pixels off- with LED displays, that’s not possible.

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

#198

Post by Izkata »

lewantmontreal wrote: post #98
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…

They do have some sort of sleep but its very inefficient so Lenovo Thinkpads actually go into hibernation after an hour or so of sleep, to avoid the user waking up to an empty battery.

On Windows, at least when it was first introduced to consumers, "Sleep" was the name of that suspend/hibernate combination. Before that you had both options "Stand By" (suspend without hibernate) and "Hibernate" in the shutdown menu.

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

#199

Post by 72deluxe »

mike_hearn wrote: post #163
72deluxe wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 scree…

I suppose you are right. I worked with MFC/C++ and COM and it was horrible. Delphi and C++ Builder things were nicer to use but fell by the wayside, particularly after Borland lost their focus and didn't bother supporting VCL correctly in themes and also had major issues with their C++ compiler. They suffered a brain drain.

I remember Windows Explorer opening swiftly back in the day (fileman even faster - https://github.com/microsoft/winfile now archived sadly) and today's Explorer experience drives me insane as to how slow it is. I have even disabled most linked-in menu items as the evaluation of these makes Explorer take even longer to load; I don't see why it can't be less than 1 second.

Anyway, I do recall Netscape taking a long time to load but then I did only have a 486 DX2 66MHz and 64MB of RAM.... The disk churning did take a long time, now you remind me...

I think using wxWidgets on Windows and Mac was quite nice when I did that (with wxFormBuilder); C++ development on Windows using native toolkits is foreign to me today as it all looks a mess from Microsoft unless I have misunderstood.

In any case, I can't see why programs are so sluggish and slow these days. I don't understand why colossal JS toolkits are needed for websites and why the average website size has grown significantly. It's like people have forgotten how to write good speedy software.

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

#200

Post by 72deluxe »

duped wrote: post #193
72deluxe wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Yes I am baffled how modern apps are painfully slow. People underestimate how slow the network is, and put a network between the app and its logic to make the app itself a thin HTTP client and "application" a mess of networked servers in the cloud. The network is your enemy, but people treat it like reading and writing to disk because it happens to be faster at their desk when they test.

I think all developers should test against a Raspberry Pi 3 for running their software (100mbps network link) just to concentrate on making it smaller and faster. This would eradicate the colossal JS libraries that have become the modern equivalent of many DLLs.
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