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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

#91

Post by ChoGGi »

yndoendo wrote: post #85
dgfitz wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's an awkward latter to climb indeed.

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

#92

Post by ChoGGi »

jonathanlydall wrote: post #59
pwdisswordfishz wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That never happened.

I second the sibling comment that it was absolutely possible to have animated icons on Windows 3.1(1). 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 assumpti…

https://winworldpc.com/product/icon-do-it/1x

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

#93

Post by TowerTall »

cr__ wrote: post #89
OptionOfT wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To this day I still attempt never to click inside a running cmd / powershell console. Too many times script execution has been halted by this. It is probably something that has been fixed long time ago but I am still a bit paranoid about it.

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

#94

Post by Inityx »

SirMaster wrote: post #36
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 just use solid black cause it's less distracting than anything else for me.

I use Middle Gray at work, and everyone thinks I'm weird for it

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_gray

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

#95

Post by distalx »

Inityx wrote: post #94
SirMaster wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just use solid black cause it's less distracting than anything else for me.

I use Middle Gray at work, and everyone thinks I'm weird for it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_gray

I’m with you on that! It’s such a great middle ground between too bright and too dark.

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

#98

Post by gulikoza »

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.

Add that before UDMA modes any disk I/O burned CPU cycles as well. A single core CPU spent most of the time reading from a slow disk. Good times!

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

#99

Post by pjmlp »

jonathanlydall wrote: post #56
theandrewbailey wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

And the best lesson new generations got out of that experience was to ship a whole browser alongside the application.

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

#100

Post by fransje26 »

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

It's a classic. I haven't played around with Samba in a long time, but if I remember correctly, you can either:

- configure SMB with a shorter timeout at boot

- configure your Samba share to mount with automount. (See [1] for inspiration)

[1] https://forum.manjaro.org/t/root-tip-how-to-systemd-mount-un...

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