Windows 7 boots slower if you set a solid background color

https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/topic/the-welcome-screen-may-be-displayed-for-30-seconds-during-the-logon-process-after-you-set-a-solid-color-as-the-desktop-background-in-windows-7-or-in-windows-server-2008-r2-b4565ced-703a-cc85-bf9c-6b3d586d6421

by ShaneCurran • 1 year ago

123 116 1 year ago

support.microsoft.com

LeoPanthera• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

I KNEW IT. SWEET VINDICATION.

dgfitz3• 1 year ago

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• 1 year 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!

znpy• 1 year 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...

yndoendo• 1 year ago

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.

redundantly• 1 year ago

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.

ale422• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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

OptionOfT• 1 year ago

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.

cr__• 1 year ago

Back in the day making a selection would actually freeze the process in some cases.

raxxorraxor2• 1 year ago

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.

lousken• 1 year ago

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

m463• 1 year ago

sounds like a job for a usb mouse-jiggler

bkummel• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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

hilbert422• 1 year ago

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.

Melatonic5• 1 year ago

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)

butlike2• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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

quickthrowman• 1 year ago

The Old New Thing by Raymond Chen

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

iggldiggl• 1 year ago

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.

butlike2• 1 year ago

Thanks!

PlunderBunny• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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

MisterTea• 1 year ago

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.

gulikoza2• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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

theandrewbailey• 1 year ago

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.

seabass-labrax• 1 year ago

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 ;)

Lammy2• 1 year ago

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”.

Covzire• 1 year ago

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.

II2II• 1 year ago

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.

1970-01-01• 1 year ago

Win 3.11 allowed 256 color .bmp wallpapers

After Dark allowed everything.

ack_complete• 1 year ago

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.

adamzochowski• 1 year ago

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

lardo• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

That never happened.

Kuraj• 1 year ago

You could _do that_?

SirMaster• 1 year ago

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

Inityx• 1 year ago

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

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

lukan• 1 year ago

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.

EvanAnderson2• 1 year ago

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.)

Melatonic5• 1 year ago

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.

omoikane• 1 year ago

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

I do have a picture for my login screen though.

Melatonic5• 1 year ago

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).

bokohut• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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.

voidfunc• 1 year ago

I just do it because I'm boring.

dunham• 1 year ago

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.

mattl• 1 year ago

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

Suppafly• 1 year ago

“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.

Braini• 1 year ago

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

robertlagrant• 1 year ago

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.

quesomaster90002• 1 year ago

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

thrtythreeforty• 1 year ago

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

quesomaster90002• 1 year ago

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.

scifi• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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

honestSysAdmin• 1 year ago

You're in good hands.

  https://vanillaos.org/team

fransje26• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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

wavemode• 1 year ago

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

ale422• 1 year ago

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

logicziller• 1 year ago

Mine is always solid black.

zamadatix2• 1 year 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• 1 year ago

(2009)

Lammy2• 1 year ago

Windows 7

anonymous1213• 1 year ago

Haha

kazinator• 1 year ago

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

supremepizza• 1 year ago

Isn't this article a bug from like 2009?

Melatonic5• 1 year ago

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.

Windows 7 boots slower if you set a solid background color

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