6 ms·
Windows 7 boots slower if you set a solid background color
- LeoPanthera 2y agoThis 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.
- redundantly 2y agoStill 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 2y agoObserved 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.
- HelloUsername 2y agoRelated: 155 points - 25.May.2009 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=625957 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=625957 493 points 4.Jan.2014 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7011228 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7011228
- Bluecobra 2y agoI seem to recall this causing buffer overruns/bad CD-Rs if you did this with the old 1x/2x CD burners.
- ToucanLoucan 2y agoI KNEW IT. SWEET VINDICATION.
- dgfitz 2y agoI 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 2y ago>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 2y agoHa nah, the whole goal was unattended installs. Nobody felt hijacked except me for wasting so much time.
- znpy 2y ago> 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 2y agoNailed it.
- yndoendo 2y agoCurrently 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.
- ChoGGi 2y agoIt's an awkward latter to climb indeed.
- yial 2y agoI 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.
- OptionOfT 2y agoThe 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 the window (and the buffer), and it went back to its original slowness.
- cr__ 2y agoBack in the day making a selection would actually freeze the process in some cases.
- TowerTall 2y agoTo 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.
- raxxorraxor 2y agoIt isn't a bug, you could actually toggle this behavior. Don't know how the option was called and cannot find it in Windows 11. But it certainly was still there in the latest Win10 build. I think it was called something like quick edit or similar.
- junon 2y agoStill does in CMD.exe
- dimava 2y agoI guess it is intentional, otherwise you couldn't select and copy stuff at all
- raxxorraxor 2y agoThere is even an option to change the behavior so that the window doesn't freeze if you select anything. Batches freeze completely when you clicked anywhere and I found out the hard way. Probably some feature that John requested because he couldn't read some output quickly enough. I don't understand how this can be the default behavior.
- m463 2y agosounds like a job for a usb mouse-jiggler
- bkummel 2y agoThis 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 2y agoNo, 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 2y agoI 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.
- zamadatix 2y agoN.b. this bug was patched in early November 2009, within the first month of Windows 7's general availability.
- hilbert42 2y agoOK, thanks. So it looks like I'd be wasting my time testing my old Win-7 machines as they'd be patched I'd reckon. Somewhere in my archive I've still a pre-release beta which from your comment wouldn't be patched but I don't think I've sufficient enthusiasm or curiosity to install it from scratch. :-)
- butlike 2y agoWhat 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 2y agohttps://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/, by Raymond Chen.
- quickthrowman 2y agoThe Old New Thing by Raymond Chen https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/
- iggldiggl 2y agoSee also https://web.archive.org/web/20211003234131/http://bytepointer.com/resources/old_new_thing/index.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20211003234131/http://bytepointe... and https://github.com/m417z/the-old-new-thing-userscript https://github.com/m417z/the-old-new-thing-userscript, because Microsoft managed to lose all the old comments during one of their many blog migrations.
- butlike 2y agoThanks!
- PlunderBunny 2y agoHands 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 2y agoI 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 2y agoAh! I can share something, you can setup an app called displayfusion to show satellite shots from google earth iirc, it's endlessly interesting
- mattl 2y agoAll my Macs running Mac OS X, iPhones and iPad have the same background color since Rhapsody DR2.
- AshamedCaptain 2y agoAnd reduce strain on the screen, and bandwidth when taking screenshots/screencasts..
- MisterTea 2y agoSolid 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 2y agoWindows 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 :)
- robertlagrant 2y agoI 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 2y agoIs it just me, or does the linked microsoft.com page hijack the back button?
- thrtythreeforty 2y agoMany microsoft.com pages do. I don't know how it hasn't infuriated them enough to fix it.
- quesomaster9000 2y agoAt 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.
- aaronmdjones 2y agoJeez don't give them such Lovecraftian ideas.
- mystified5016 2y agoEdge your users by bringing Microsoft Edge to edge devices with Edge Cloud edge Edition Advantage! E: 365
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- scifi 2y agoOK, 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 2y agoMaybe 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 2y agoOver 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
- honestSysAdmin 2y agoYou're in good hands. https://vanillaos.org/team
- fransje26 2y agoIt'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-unit-samples/1191 https://forum.manjaro.org/t/root-tip-how-to-systemd-mount-un...
- Saris 2y agoI never understood why it waits so long, surely maybe 2-3 seconds would be plenty as a default.
- wavemode 2y agoWhen I saw the title I assumed this would be a Raymond Chen article...
- ale42 2y agoI was hoping for one :-) Unfortunately not, no explanation about why this even happens... too bad.
- logicziller 2y agoMine is always solid black.
- zamadatix 2y ago"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 2y ago(2009)
- Lammy 2y ago> Windows 7
- jerhewet 2y ago[flagged]
- zakisaad 2y agoGiven 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.
- anonymous1213 2y agoHaha
- kazinator 2y agoWhat does the update do? Install a picture of young Bill Gates, throwing a floppy disc?
- supremepizza 2y agoIsn't this article a bug from like 2009?
- Melatonic 2y agoI'm not sure why I do this still (there was an old reason - and it could be this boot time thing) but when I want a solid background in windows I always create a 1x1 pixel image of the colour I want (usually a very dark grey) and then set that as the background and tell windows to tile it. This still produces a solid desktop background of course. There are so many little quirks to windows and I've been using it so long I know there used to be a good reason to do this - vaguely I remember it being related to minimising RAM in something like windows 2000 or XP. Probably from the days when I was trying to squeeze every ounce of performance out of hand me down parts to play some old game.