51–60 of 121 posts
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 remember when I was a child, crashing my father's Windows 3 computer because I set all the desktop icons to animated GIFs!
When I saw the title I assumed this would be a Raymond Chen article...
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.
Still happens for Disk Cleanup, in a way. It can get stuck at parts, and it might finish but the window doesn't go away until you hover the mouse above it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I remember when I was a child, crashing my father's Windows 3 computer because I set all the desktop icons to animated GIFs!
That never happened.
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 :)
Windows 98 introduced Active Desktop, allowing you to use JPG wallpapers. In my experience, enabling Active Desktop would make everything slower, so I always opted to take the RAM hit on BMP wallpapers. It was even better if I could save the BMP in 8-bit and still have it look good.
It's because Active Desktop was essentially running an instance of Internet Explorer rendering to your desktop, of course it's slow and memory intensive.
Disabling Active Desktop and the fancy views on the left pane of Windows Explorer made Windows 98 change from quite slow to super responsive.
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.”
In 2011 I was contacted and engaged as an expert consultant by a mobile radio deployment company which was working on a federal government funded program to update the mobile law enforcement vehicles technology operations within the State of Pennsylvania. There was a technology problem no one else could solve even after having many Phds and telecom engineers toiling over algorithms and speculative performance numbers of a large wireless operator in the USA. I of course had to sign NDAs because the information I was exposed to proved that wireless coverage was in fact NOT everywhere and this engineering information directly conflicted with the hundreds of millions spent on marketing stating otherwise. "Can you hear me now?" [NOT a disclosure of the parties involved but fitting here nonetheless.] After many meetings with all the book educated experts flaunting their credentials the day finally came after I asked several times over to just show me the problem. We drove many hours to a facility in Pennsylvania to meet all the "experts" and to witness in person a law enforcement vehicle that was experiencing this detrimental network delay that was making the system unusable and putting law enforcement officers' lives at great risk from this delay. We sat in a meeting all morning with 20 experts around a table talking about what the problem could be and finally I raised my hand and said to all the experts, "Please just show me the problem." A law enforcement vehicle was brought in at my request and I walked out to meet the officer and listen to his concerns. Within one minute of meeting him he logged into his remote profile and I immediately knew what the issue was, his desktop image. Within two minutes of meeting him I had instructed the domain admin on the restricted law enforcement mobile network to set all remote desktops to pure black, NO images. Three minutes after meeting him he logged out and logged back in to his mobile law enforcement computer and he then paused, looked at me in amazement and called me a genius. He told me they had been working on this issue for months and had called expert after expert and no one could fix it and here I did it in less than two minutes. Four minutes later I walked back into the room of "experts" and informed everyone the problem had been fixed and literally no one said a word and just stared at me in awe until we left a short time later.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I remember when I was a child, crashing my father's Windows 3 computer because I set all the desktop icons to animated GIFs!
That never happened.
I was only 11 or 12 at the time, but I distinctly remember the two Windows 3.1(1) machines in our school computer center having animated icons on their desktop in '93 or '94, but I know I couldn't do the same on my own PC at home, so they must have had some extra software installed to make that possible.
My assumption today is that being so long ago it would be some other format, but Wikipedia says GIF format was released in 1987 so it might have been.
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.”