Windows 7 boots slower if you set a solid background color

[LeoPanthera]

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.

[dgfitz]

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.

[OptionOfT]

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.

[Bluecobra]

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

[ToucanLoucan]

I KNEW IT. SWEET VINDICATION.

[HelloUsername]

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

[redundantly]

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.

[yial]

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.

[m463]

sounds like a job for a usb mouse-jiggler

[a2128]

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

[fransje26]

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...

[Saris]

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

[honestSysAdmin]

You're in good hands.

  https://vanillaos.org/team

[PlunderBunny]

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.”

[gulikoza]

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 :)

[SirMaster]

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

[AshamedCaptain]

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

[EvanAnderson]

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.)

[bokohut]

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.

[MisterTea]

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.

[lardo]

I remember when I was a child, crashing my father's Windows 3 computer because I set all the desktop icons to animated GIFs!

[omoikane]

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

I do have a picture for my login screen though.

[mattl]

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

[Suppafly]

> “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.

[tracker1]

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.

[dunham]

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.

[voidfunc]

I just do it because I'm boring.

[Braini]

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

[lukan]

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.

[scifi]

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]

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.

[butlike]

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?

[quickthrowman]

The Old New Thing by Raymond Chen

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

[Nullabillity]

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

[wavemode]

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

[ale42]

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

[robertlagrant]

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.

[Melatonic]

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.

[bkummel]

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]

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

[kazinator]

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

[quesomaster9000]

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

[thrtythreeforty]

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

[logicziller]

Mine is always solid black.

[supremepizza]

Isn't this article a bug from like 2009?

[zamadatix]

"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]

(2009)

[Lammy]

> Windows 7

[zakisaad]

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.

[anonymous1213]

Haha