[HN Gopher] Windows 7 boots slower if you set a solid background...
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Windows 7 boots slower if you set a solid background color
Author : ShaneCurran
Score : 76 points
Date : 2025-01-28 18:48 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (support.microsoft.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (support.microsoft.com)
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| 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.
| HelloUsername wrote:
| Related:
|
| 155 points - 25.May.2009
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=625957
|
| 493 points 4.Jan.2014
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7011228
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| I KNEW IT. SWEET VINDICATION.
| dgfitz wrote:
| 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.
| SteveNuts wrote:
| >The solution was to use the java api to move the mouse back
| and forth over the progress bar.
|
| And I thought browsers highjacking the scrollbar was bad!
| dgfitz wrote:
| Ha nah, the whole goal was unattended installs. Nobody felt
| hijacked except me for wasting so much time.
| znpy wrote:
| > The solution was to use the java api to move the mouse back
| and forth over the progress bar.
|
| Oh the memories of playing with java.awt.Robot...
| dgfitz wrote:
| Nailed it.
| redundantly wrote:
| 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.
| ale42 wrote:
| Observed the same, it's very annoying. I start a script to
| image the VM (which among others does disk cleanup before
| finally handing over to sysprep)... and sometimes I find the
| unattended VM hours later still waiting for me to move the
| mouse over the window.
| yial wrote:
| 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.
| dijit wrote:
| 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.
| Bluecobra wrote:
| I seem to recall this causing buffer overruns/bad CD-Rs if you
| did this with the old 1x/2x CD burners.
| bkummel wrote:
| 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...
| mrguyorama wrote:
| 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 session.
|
| I wonder what's actually going on though. I was hoping this was
| a link to Raymend Chen
| hilbert42 wrote:
| 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 with Win 7 so I might
| experiment with it.
| butlike wrote:
| 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?
| Nullabillity wrote:
| https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/, by Raymond Chen.
| quickthrowman wrote:
| _The Old New Thing_ by Raymond Chen
|
| https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/
| PlunderBunny wrote:
| 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."
| tracker1 wrote:
| I did that for a long time... mostly in that I didn't like the
| distraction. Now, I have a directory (a few actually) for
| wallpapers. Currently shuffling a different landscape photo
| every few minutes.
| seanthemon wrote:
| Ah! I can share something, you can setup an app called
| displayfusion to show satellite shots from google earth iirc,
| it's endlessly interesting
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| And reduce strain on the screen, and bandwidth when taking
| screenshots/screencasts..
| MisterTea wrote:
| Solid black on all my systems save for Plan 9 Rio which is left
| default grey. I have windows open all the times so a background
| image is useless.
| gulikoza wrote:
| 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 :)
| ClassyJacket wrote:
| I mean, you have to uncompress an image to display it anyway,
| so it would've made no difference.
| _nalply wrote:
| This assumes that memory for the system and the graphics
| card is shared.
| kevingadd wrote:
| Yeah, Windows in this era already had the concept of
| bitmaps in system memory and bitmaps in device memory, so
| the desktop background could have been decompressed into
| GPU memory and then thrown away to free up CPU-side RAM.
| Not sure whether it would actually do that though.
| numpad0 wrote:
| Or, that desktop rendering is not GPU accelerated.
| tom_ wrote:
| But the uncompressed data doesn't need to stick around. It
| could be uncompressed piece by piece into a much smaller
| temp buffer, with the revealed parts of the areas of
| interest copied into video RAM as necessary.
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| 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.
| jonathanlydall wrote:
| 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.
| crummy wrote:
| Didn't Active Desktop let you set a webpage as your
| wallpaper?
|
| Crazy times.
| seabass-labrax wrote:
| It might have been NT that added support: I used Windows XP
| Service Pack 3 extensively, and by that time Windows
| supported JPEG pictures as desktop backgrounds. That is,
| _JPG_ pictures in Windows-speak ;)
| Lammy wrote:
| My recollection is Windows 98 popping up a box like "Click
| yes to enable Active Desktop to do this" when I had AD
| disabled and tried to set a JPEG wallpaper. That would imply
| SHELL32 >= 4.7 https://www.geoffchappell.com/studies/windows/
| shell/shell32/...
|
| Wikipedia sez "Since Windows XP, if a non-BMP image is used
| as Windows Desktop wallpaper, Windows will convert non-BMP
| image to BMP image in background." and Group Policy has some
| relevant options:
|
| "Enable Active Desktop" ("ForceActiveDesktopOn") https://admx
| .help/?Category=Windows_11_2022&Policy=Microsoft... has the
| description "Allows HTML and JPEG Wallpaper".
|
| Also "Allow only bitmapped wallpaper" ("NoHTMLPaper") option:
| https://admx.help/?Category=Windows_11_2022&Policy=Microsoft.
| ..
|
| "If users select files with other image formats, such as
| JPEG, GIF, PNG, or HTML, through the Browse button on the
| Desktop tab, the wallpaper does not load. Files that are
| autoconverted to a .bmp format, such as JPEG, GIF, and PNG,
| can be set as Wallpaper by right-clicking the image and
| selecting "Set as Wallpaper"."
|
| Both "Supported on: Windows Server 2003, Windows XP, and
| Windows 2000 only".
| Dwedit wrote:
| It still does only support BMP wallpapers. When you pick
| something that's not a BMP, it converts it to a BMP file then
| uses that as the wallpaper.
|
| Look in "%appdata%\Microsoft\Windows\Themes". There will be
| "TranscodedWallpaper" (a BMP file without extension), and
| another copy of the exact same file in the "CachedFiles"
| directory.
| Covzire wrote:
| The first tech support call to a PC manufacturer I remember
| from the 90's was because of this. Was playing around on the
| 486 in our family room and set a high color wallpaper on
| windows 3.11. Took forever to boot and we didn't know why.
| lardo wrote:
| I remember when I was a child, crashing my father's Windows 3
| computer because I set all the desktop icons to animated GIFs!
| pwdisswordfishz wrote:
| That never happened.
| kachapopopow wrote:
| You could in fact make icons animated, they were not gifs
| as far as I remember and I can definitely see it crashing
| windows 3 with 2mb memory sticks. I still have those memory
| sticks laying around.
| jonathanlydall wrote:
| 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 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.
| SirMaster wrote:
| I just use solid black cause it's less distracting than
| anything else for me.
| lukan wrote:
| I mean, I started with Amiga and it had windows. But then DOS
| was next.
|
| But I always used black as the background for energy saving. I
| believe at least there black is more efficient.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| 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 wallpaper (the desktop
| that appears behind the logon UI) to a photo for Server (2016)
| still irks me. Sure-- set that on the desktop OS, but servers
| don't need pretty pictures by default. (This decision is
| emblematic of the "children are running the pre-school"
| mentality that seems to be pervasive at MSFT now.)
| omoikane wrote:
| I still use a solid black background. I rarely see my
| background anyways.
|
| I do have a picture for my login screen though.
| bokohut wrote:
| As it relates to the real world from this issue, it was a life
| and death situation for law enforcement.
|
| 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.
| t8sr wrote:
| I mean this in the nicest way possible: this paragraph, with
| all the repetition and constant use of the word "expert", is
| completely unhinged. If you're currently on stimulants, then
| fair enough. If not, I really recommend re-reading what you
| write.
| dankwizard wrote:
| (It's a bot)
| gerdesj wrote:
| "he logged into his remote profile"
|
| Yes.
| evanjrowley wrote:
| The term expert is used frequently in US government
| settings, per the US Office of Personnel Management:
| https://www.opm.gov/frequently-asked-questions/assessment-
| po...
|
| Anyone above the lowest pay grades gets categorized as some
| type of "expert". As the gov tries to justify higher pay to
| keep up with inflation and compete with private job
| markets, more people become categorized as "experts" to
| fill higher pay grades. I can totally see how someone
| throwing the term around could appear unhinged to an
| outsider, but the reality is that the US government as a
| whole is unhinged.
| gloflo wrote:
| I am not OP and I see nothing of the sort you are
| implicating. The writing is dry humor and funny. The expert
| repetition of the word "expert" for the obvious non-expert
| expert delivers a good bit of the story.
| Cpoll wrote:
| It's a bit dramatic, but "unhinged" is excessive. I imagine
| the repetition is a stylistic choice. It builds up the
| conclusion, and turns a one-line anecdote into a story.
| voidfunc wrote:
| I just do it because I'm boring.
| dunham wrote:
| I always used a solid background in X (usually slate gray) to
| save memory. I've continued to do that in general, but happen
| to have a Monument Valley background on one of my laptops at
| the moment.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| I love that at the end there's a "How to set a solid color as the
| desktop background in Windows 7 or in Windows Server 2008 R2"
| section.
| quesomaster9000 wrote:
| Is it just me, or does the linked microsoft.com page hijack the
| back button?
| thrtythreeforty wrote:
| Many microsoft.com pages do. I don't know how it hasn't
| infuriated them enough to fix it.
| quesomaster9000 wrote:
| At this point I wouldn't be surprised if their site loaded a
| WASM-compiled remote-desktop viewer to interact with 'Edge in
| the cloud' just to view the page you want.
| mystified5016 wrote:
| Edge your users by bringing Microsoft Edge to edge devices
| with Edge Cloud edge Edition Advantage!
|
| E: 365
| aaronmdjones wrote:
| Jeez don't give them such Lovecraftian ideas.
| scifi wrote:
| OK, but the article seems to focus on boot time and not
| performance afterward. During the netbook craze, it seemed like a
| big performance boost to remove a hi-res desktop in favor of a
| solid color. At least that's my recollection years later.
| thereisnospork wrote:
| Maybe it's been fixed in 11, but in windows 10 the automatic
| accent color option would lag the entire machine in order to pick
| a color. Which if you use the slideshow option can be quite
| frequent.
| a2128 wrote:
| 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
| wavemode wrote:
| When I saw the title I assumed this would be a Raymond Chen
| article...
| ale42 wrote:
| I was hoping for one :-) Unfortunately not, no explanation
| about why this even happens... too bad.
| logicziller wrote:
| Mine is always solid black.
| zamadatix wrote:
| "Windows 7 boots slower if you set a solid background color"
| sounds like an interesting overlooked performance issue but it's
| really "(2009) Windows hotfix for 30 second delay during login".
| LorenDB wrote:
| (2009)
| jerhewet wrote:
| Nice to know that people still (or even previously) running W7
| are / were using a black background. Made that choice myself when
| W7 was in beta, and all of my Windows machines (W7, W10, one
| sacrificial W11, one seriously awesome M2 VM running on a Mac
| Mini) have always been black backgrounds, and it's my preferred
| background over everything else.
|
| My daily drivers (personal, not development) are Windows 7. AFAIC
| W7 will always be peak Windows.
|
| And all of the brainless parrots that feel obligated to
| regurgitate "Your machine has been taken over by viruses /
| botnets / whatever!" nonsense can just SHUT THE FUCK UP.
| Seriously. Stop spewing your bullshit "securitah!" commentary,
| because it's OBVIOUSLY FUCKING BULLSHIT. I've been running ESET
| NOD32 since the late 90's on all of my machines and I have
| _NEVER_ been infected by _ANY_ virus on _ANY_ of my machines.
|
| Windows Defender isn't bad (it's actually pretty robust), but
| NOD32 leaves it in the dust. And if you're sick and tired of the
| broken, invasive bullshit that Microsoft is forcing down your
| throat with W11, you might want to think long and hard about
| reinstalling W7 on a pre-2020 / pre-TPM machine and taking back
| your machine. W11 is not "personal computing". It's a fucking
| appliance that's owned by Microsoft, and they're renting it out
| to you at their convenience.
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