Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Windows 7 boots slower if you set a solid background color

support.microsoft.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 121 posts

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

#81

Post by zamadatix »

hilbert42 wrote: post #9
mrguyorama wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wish I'd known that years ago. I always use solid colors for background as it's less of a distraction (I suppose if I'd alternated between an image and solid color I'd have noticed it but I didn't). The question remains why didn't Microsoft notice the problem at the time as to the programmer it should have been obvious. But then from experience I think I've answered that already. BTW, I've still some old machines w…

N.b. this bug was patched in early November 2009, within the first month of Windows 7's general availability.

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

#82

Post by zakisaad »

jerhewet wrote: post #57

[flagged]

Given your attitude, this comment is probably futile, but here goes nothing.

Your attitude here, to give a somewhat more illustrative automotive example, is akin to shunning many modern safety devices, standards and common sense. Driving on bare tyres is fine pretty most the time when sunny, until the road is wet, upon which you will likely end up in a ditch. Same deal with seatbelts, where you're fine for >99% of the time, until your knees end up sandwiched in the windscreen after an accident. Not to mention ABS, AEB, and a whole slew of other safety advancements.

You can keep driving your '70s wagon with bench seats and no seatbelt, no one will stop you. But when your banking details are sniped or your system is subject to a cryptolocking attack and you have to deal with the subsequent inconvenience/crisis, you know why.

If you're going to adopt "but it hasn't happened to me" attitude, you should drop the "just SHUT THE FUCK UP" attitude in your post and start ignoring those comments instead, since the people telling you to upgrade are plainly, objectively correct.

You don't need to use Windows at all to have a modern and secure computing platform, BTW. Once ads started appearing in Windows, it was clear they abandoned all reason for madness. Any power user using it as their primary OS is just asking for it at this point.

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

#84

Post by honestSysAdmin »

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

You're in good hands.

  https://vanillaos.org/team

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

#85

Post by yndoendo »

dgfitz wrote: post #16
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.

I discovered a bug in a microsoft software installer where it would hang unless you moved the mouse over the progress bar. Discovered this when trying to use a java api to make silent installers for programs that didn't have them. The solution was to use the java api to move the mouse back and forth over the progress bar.

Currently use AutoIT and InnoSetup for installation wrappers those that don't have installers with silent support or have the ability to automate the settings. This is where BSD and Linux shine compared to Windows! Scripting and automation is built-in with the ladders and greatly lacking in the former.

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

#86

Post by ahartmetz »

dijit wrote: post #48
yial wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had an issue like this once installing windows 2000. If you didn’t move the mouse during the installation, it would hang and fail. Finally got it to install by sitting there moving the mouse.

Wow, I had that exact same issue before. I wonder what the cause is/was. I'm aware that old PS/2 connectors would interrupt, vs being polled like USB.

USB only polls at the USB protocol level - it signals activity to the host with interrupts like a normal person^W device.

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

#87

Post by ack_complete »

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 :)

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.

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

#88

Post by fourthark »

crummy wrote: post #61
jonathanlydall wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. 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.

Didn't Active Desktop let you set a webpage as your wallpaper? Crazy times.

All in order to prove that the browser should be part of the OS and was not at all gratuitous tying to defeat Netscape.

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

#89

Post by cr__ »

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…

Back in the day making a selection would actually freeze the process in some cases.

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

#90

Post by Suppafly »

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.”

> “it will draw faster and use less memory.”

Honestly for me it's half that and half liking to have a plain, not distracting, background. I'm not to the point that I'll turn off desktop icons, but I like a plain black background.

Post reply on HN