Windows 7 boots slower if you set a solid background color | Hacker News Reader

Windows 7 boots slower if you set a solid background color

support.microsoft.com

123 pointsShaneCurran117 comments

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.

155 points - 25.May.2009 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=625957

493 points 4.Jan.2014 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7011228

I KNEW IT. SWEET VINDICATION.

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.

>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!

Ha nah, the whole goal was unattended installs. Nobody felt hijacked except me for wasting so much time.

> 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...

Nailed it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I seem to recall this causing buffer overruns/bad CD-Rs if you did this with the old 1x/2x CD burners.

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 the window (and the buffer), and it went back to its original slowness.

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.

It 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.

Still does in CMD.exe

I guess it is intentional, otherwise you couldn't select and copy stuff at all

There 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.

i always thought freezing the terminal causes a pause of the app as well, is it just the rendering?

sounds like a job for a usb mouse-jiggler

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

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...

I never understood why it waits so long, surely maybe 2-3 seconds would be plenty as a default.

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 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.

Ah! I can share something, you can setup an app called displayfusion to show satellite shots from google earth iirc, it's endlessly interesting

And reduce strain on the screen, and bandwidth when taking screenshots/screencasts..

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.

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 :)

I mean, you have to uncompress an image to display it anyway, so it would've made no difference.

This assumes that memory for the system and the graphics card is shared.

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.

Or, that desktop rendering is not GPU accelerated.

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.

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.

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

Crazy times.

It would let you just drop gifs on the desktop too.

IIRC I had (at my first job, at the age of like 12) a bunch of constantly moving mechwarrior gifs on my desktop. Timberwolf and Vulture for sure.

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

Yes. I wrote some js to have a drawing of a woman blink her eyes with random intervals. Was fun but super distracting.

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

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 ;)

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”.

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.

Early versions of Windows included smaller bitmaps that could be tiled and, if I recall correctly, software would only render visible portions of the screen. (Though I could be confusing it for classic Mac OS, since I didn't really try GUI programming until I replaced my ailing 486 with a used Mac.) So it was possible to have a pretty desktop without crushing performance.

Win 3.11 allowed 256 color .bmp wallpapers

After Dark allowed everything.

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!

Huge performance increase I still do (probably with negligible effects) was to manually set the disk cache (or whatever it's called - ram using HDD) to a set amount (usually double the ram). Letting windows manage it meant it was constantly changing in size and moving around the drive and with spinning disks killed performance. Also made defragging often mkre necessary. And of course disabling system restore.

I still do it out of habit with SSDs and I imagine it's mostly unnecessary but never ran into issues. I figure at worst it may increase the life of the SSD

BMP supports compression, but its basic, RLE style, so only line art compresses well.

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.

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.

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.

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

You could _do that_?

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.

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.

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.)

Good practice but RDP should automatically not be showing the desktop background anyways (depending on RDP settings). You could also set a desktop background if you like and manually tell RDP to never show the background of the system your connected to.

I push down a solid color background w/ Group Policy everywhere I can.

re: the RDP client settings - I can certainly control that. I just usually forget to. The default "Experience" setting for Microsoft's RDP client is "Detection connection quality automatically" and it has a much more optimistic view of "connection quality" than I do.

I still use a solid black background. I rarely see my background anyways.

I do have a picture for my login screen though.

Good login screen background is key - agreed here. Depends on the system for me - if it's something powerful with many monitors I love a good multi monitor background (where each one is different but a similar theme).

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.

I mean this in the nicest way possible: this paragraph, with all the repetition and constant use of the word "expert", is completely unhinged. I really recommend re-reading what you write.

(It's a bot)

"he logged into his remote profile"

Yes.

And his post history. It's always one sentence about who he is, then a paragraph of text of one of his many careers slightly related to OP

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. (For perspective, you can't afford to live independently in the DC metro area unless you're in the top 1/3 of 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 lives in it's own unhinged little world.

Anyone above the lowest pay grades gets categorized as some type of "expert".

I've read that at the F.B.I., anyone not pushing a broom gets the title "agent."

It was absolutely not like that, at least up until 10 years ago. Agents and the operational staff were totally separate.

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.

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.

It echoes the "cosmonauts just used a pencil!" Copy pasta.

I just do it because I'm boring.

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.

All my Macs running Mac OS X, iPhones and iPad have the same background color since Rhapsody DR2.

> “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.

Its also faster when used via Remote Desktop, VNC etc. so still doing it for these reasons.

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.

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.

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?

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/, by Raymond Chen.

The Old New Thing by Raymond Chen

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/

See also https://web.archive.org/web/20211003234131/http://bytepointe... and 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.

Thanks!

When I saw the title I assumed this would be a Raymond Chen article...

I was hoping for one :-) Unfortunately not, no explanation about why this even happens... too bad.

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.

I'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.

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...

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

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.

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

OK, 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. :-)

I've been doing this for years (1x1 pixel image set to tiled). I assumed it was no longer necessary but figured it wouldn't hurt.

Do you have a link to the thing about the session system timing out ? Curious about how this works behind the hood even if it is patched (especially since sometimes windows bugs will rarely come back in very niche specific situations)

What does the update do? Install a picture of young Bill Gates, throwing a floppy disc?

Is it just me, or does the linked microsoft.com page hijack the back button?

Many microsoft.com pages do. I don't know how it hasn't infuriated them enough to fix it.

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.

Edge your users by bringing Microsoft Edge to edge devices with Edge Cloud edge Edition Advantage!

E: 365

Jeez don't give them such Lovecraftian ideas.

Mine is always solid black.

Isn't this article a bug from like 2009?

"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".

(2009)

> Windows 7

Haha

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