Why Windows 7 Took Forever To Load If You Had a Solid Background (pcworld.com) 57
An anonymous reader quotes a report from PCWorld: Windows 7 came onto the market in 2009 and put Microsoft back on the road to success after Windows Vista's annoying failures. But Windows 7 was not without its faults, as this curious story proves. Some users apparently encountered a vexing problem at the time: if they set a single-color image as the background, their Windows 7 PC always took 30 seconds to start the operating system and switch from the welcome screen to the desktop.
In a recent blog post, Microsoft veteran Raymond Chen explains the exact reason for this. According to him, a simple programming error meant that users had to wait longer for the system to boot. After logging in, Windows 7 first set up the desktop piece by piece, i.e. the taskbar, the desktop window, icons for applications, and even the background image. The system waited patiently for all components to finish loading and received feedback from each individual component. Or, it switched from the welcome screen to the desktop after 30 seconds if it didn't receive any feedback.
The problem here: The code for the message that the background image is ready was located within the background image bitmap code, which means that the message never appeared if you did not have a real background image bitmap. And a single color is not such a bitmap. The result: the logon system waited in vain for the message that the background has finished loading, so Windows 7 never started until the 30 second fallback activated and sent users to the desktop. The problem could also occur if users had activated the "Hide desktop icons" group policy. This was due to the fact that such policies were only added after the main code had been written and called by an If statement. However, Windows 7 was also unable to recognize this at first and therefore took longer to load.
In a recent blog post, Microsoft veteran Raymond Chen explains the exact reason for this. According to him, a simple programming error meant that users had to wait longer for the system to boot. After logging in, Windows 7 first set up the desktop piece by piece, i.e. the taskbar, the desktop window, icons for applications, and even the background image. The system waited patiently for all components to finish loading and received feedback from each individual component. Or, it switched from the welcome screen to the desktop after 30 seconds if it didn't receive any feedback.
The problem here: The code for the message that the background image is ready was located within the background image bitmap code, which means that the message never appeared if you did not have a real background image bitmap. And a single color is not such a bitmap. The result: the logon system waited in vain for the message that the background has finished loading, so Windows 7 never started until the 30 second fallback activated and sent users to the desktop. The problem could also occur if users had activated the "Hide desktop icons" group policy. This was due to the fact that such policies were only added after the main code had been written and called by an If statement. However, Windows 7 was also unable to recognize this at first and therefore took longer to load.
Interesting (Score:2)
Wouldn't matter today (Score:4, Insightful)
Even if you can see the desktop in less than 30 seconds, Windows is useless for several minutes after startup because it launches a nearly infinite number of I/O-bound processes as soon it starts. This is undoubtedly because each and every development group at Microsoft thinks that their special software goodness simply must run before any other group's software. Best to go get a cup of coffee while you wait for it to stop thrashing.
Re: (Score:1)
Really? I haven't had this issue in over a decade. What variety of potato are you running Windows on?
Re: (Score:3)
I don't recall this being an issue in Win7 either. Or XP. Or 98. Or 95.
Not saying it was the snappiest experience ever, but it was rare for me to need to wait more than 10-15 seconds at most for things to be usable.
Then again I didn't install a giant pile of garbage, and I would remove stuff I didn't need. It was the bloatware that caused the issues for me, not the OS itself.
Re: (Score:2)
With earlier versions (2000, NT, maybe 9x?) it loaded everything first before presenting the login screen. This led to criticism of the long boot times.
With XP they change it to display the login screen more quickly, while still loading many things in the background.
The rest is a user third party developer problem - a lot of applications insert themselves to start at boot - often without giving the option not to or informing the user about it.
Re: (Score:2)
I also have not had to wait for Windows 10 or to become responsive and usable much more than 10 seconds after the desktop appears.
My ongoing nag is the slightly improved performance of the Multiple UNC Provider (MUP). Back in NT and 2000 days you could search for something in File Explorer and wait impatiently as, eventually, the MUP would enlist the assistance of DNS etc. to search for an object, file usually, that had a FQDN embedded that should NOT exist externally. But it would in fact search the Intern
Re: (Score:2)
I have a fast computer, but that doesn't stop Microsoft from launching a ton of additional processes at boot time.
Some of them are pretty simple, and are just fetching things like the latest weather and news updates. Others are more annoying, like injecting ads to "upgrade" to Microsoft Edge or renew your XBox Game Pass subscription.
Re: (Score:3)
On the flip side, NT3.51(or NT4) when a member of a domain, would prompt for login before the system capable of processing the login request...
Re: (Score:2)
Oh my, this has not been an issue for a while now. When I went from spinning rust to SSD Windows 7 was MUCH faster loading as well as overall performance enhanced greatly. I even went from SSD to NVME on a few Windows 7 machines and once again the performance and boot speeds were greatly enhanced. I still have a Windows 7 machine that uses an NVME and I just tried the solid background versus a bitmap, and sure enough, the solid background took much longer to get to the desktop. Now I know why some Windows 7
Re: (Score:2)
I wonder why this wasn't widely reported earlier?
Because Windows 10 came out in 2015 when solid state drives were still fairly expensive. The people that stayed on 7 were not necessarily the ones without a desktop background.
Re: (Score:2)
The world has a *you* problem. Please kill yourself.
Sorry I won't, and that sounds like a *you* problem to have.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It's about time you upgraded to a solid state drive. You wouldn't even know this is happening.
The real problem is that Windows does not schedule background processes with lower priority. And the main UI process is not higher priority than apps (I think). It's fine to be utterly maxed on CPU and I/O as long as you have it all prioritized correctly.
Winnable Wackamole (Score:2)
Windows is useless for several minutes after startup because it launches a nearly infinite number of I/O-bound processes as soon it starts
Yes, but that's a problem that you can fix first by uninstalling any app that you do not need and then by playing a game of wackamole where you shutdown/uninstall services etc. that start eating lots of CPU or I/O. It takes a few days to a week for all the nasties to pop up and get whacked but at least it is a game of whack-a-mole that you can win...although you do ocassionally get further rounds after windows updates.
Re: (Score:2)
Not just MS's people, but every installed software. They all want their updaters and all sorts of other services.
Re: (Score:3)
I have completely the opposite experience. I've actually noticed that Win11 seems to carefully manage system load during and after logon to keep the desktop mostly responsive, and it seems to actually delay or carefully sequence the loading of "background" tasks.
I can literally log in, fire up a demanding game and Windows will happily continue "lazy loading" stuff in the background. It might take a minute or two for things like Dropbox or OneDrive or whatever to actually appear, but the tradeoff is you can
Huh... (Score:4, Insightful)
I always had a solid color for a backdrop and never noticed this problem. But then, I disabled as many background tasks and scheduled nonsense as possible. For this to be a problem, it might have required a specific combination of factors. My system ran a LOT faster and better with the system maintenance and reporting features disabled.
PS - typing this on a 13-year-old Win7 machine right now.
Re:Huh... (Score:5, Informative)
You probably never acknowledged the problem while it existed and wrote it off as some peculiarity. It was fixed in a hotfix quite early in Windows 7's world. Unless you used Windows 7 in the first three months of its release you would never have seen the bug.
And no it did not depend on any "nonsense", no need to guess here, the explanation is right there in the link for you to read. In fact the more "nonsense" you disabled the more likely you were to hit the timeout window as Windows was waiting for non-existing tasks to complete.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: Huh... (Score:1)
Bug cameoflaged as expected behavior? (Score:2)
Did this bug go unrecognized for so long because nobody realized that a 30-second wait was not the expected behavior?
Privacy (Score:5, Funny)
Can't wait for the "Why Windows 12 Crippled Performance If You Opted Out of Data Collection" behaviour to be reported as a "bug" in ten years.
maybe not in all cases (Score:2)
Huh. Don't remember this, and I usually had a solid colored background. Like another poster said, perhaps it requires a specific combination of factors.
I still have Win7 on my desktop machine but I don't use it anymore. Too much of a road warrior so I got a high powered laptop instead.
Re: (Score:2)
I also don't remember this, and my Desktop was allways set to the std. blue-ish color.
However I suppose this was fixed, along the way, some time before resonable priced SSDs were available, because with SSDs XP and 7 were a super fast experience .. .. I miss that experience.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: maybe not in all cases (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
... only to be borked by some other change in 2025.
Code residing in wallpaper :o (Score:3)
Explains how malware disguised as a
Re: (Score:3)
I think you're misinterpreting that.
" the background image bitmap code" is the code that handled using bitmaps as background images, not code embedded in a bitmap.
WTF were they thinking? (Score:2)
Code in an image file to indicate it has loaded?
Microsoft hiring Poetering makes sense now.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Windows 7 (Score:3)
It would be nice if we could return to Windows 7 because it was a better operating system than Windows 10 and windows 11, windows 11 sucks.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Windows 7 (Score:5, Interesting)
It would be nice if we could return to Windows 7 because it was a better operating system than Windows 10 and windows 11, windows 11 sucks.
I had my entire family on Kubuntu, and it worked fine for them for years. My wife and I told our sons stories on a regular basis about how bad Windows is, so they were happy with Kubuntu. In those stories, I always included how all software is written for Windows (including a history lesson about how Microsoft got away with illegal monopoly maintenance), but there is usually a Linux workaround for the average use-case. Most of the games he plays come from Steam, so he was covered.
One of his favorite games has a Windows-only mod system, so he converted over to Windows just to play that game with his mods. He told us over and over again how much he hates using Windows, but he was stuck with it because of the mod system for that one game. He tried to install it on Kubuntu via Wine, but it didn't work. So he accepted his fate.
UNTIL
He was watching videos for Linux Mint on YouTube, and thought it looked foin! He had me dual-boot Windows/Mint on his computer, and he managed to get Wine installed and working with this game's mod system. He howled in excitement for his success, and told us he no longer has any reason to use Windows. He absolutely loves Mint, and I have also been very impressed. I plan to leave Kubuntu, and transition all of our Linux desktops to it.
Epilogue: this is all on his newly built computer. He wanted an nvidia 5070; but not only are they outrageously expensive, I told him I prefer to not burn down the house with nvidia's substandard junk video cards. So he bought an AMD 7700xt instead (which was within his saved allowance budget), and this card screams on Linux. AMD has really upped their game with this card, and he is thrilled with it. It replaced his GTX 3060, which frequently stalled under the games he plays.
My future video card purchases will be AMD, as nvidia no longer makes competitive GPUs.
Re: (Score:1)
Some say Windows 7 is the most apocalypse-friendly Windows. MS won't care about licensing because they'd be a smoking ash-heap. Hopefully we won't have to test that theory in the field.
Explains a lot (Score:2)
This report confirms my suspicions that most of the boot / connect / shutdown time for computers is spent in timeouts. Modern CPUs are stupidly fast. Negotiations between components and even systems should take no more than milliseconds. Any human-scale delays are indicative of a programming oversight or outright error of one sort or another.
And, indeed, you sometimes find systems that are working correctly that are close enough to instant-on or instant-connect that it doesn't matter. My current Linux la
Re: (Score:2)
Bufferbloat; delay between SYN-ACK and data (Score:2)
Is there a case where a firewall grabs the SYN and then waits five seconds to forward it?
A time from sending SYN to receiving the SYN-ACK in excess of 1000 ms is either geostationary satellite latency [wikipedia.org] or bufferbloat [wikipedia.org] or both. However, a lot of timeouts don't include only the handshake. They also include the time to receive payload data after the handshake. If a server is bogged down, or it has to calculate a dynamic response that isn't cached, it may take a second or more to reply. Likewise if the connection is intercepted by a third party, and the third-party server is running tar pit software [wikipedia.org]
windows 7 updates (Score:1)
after decades (Score:1)
I'd still like to know why Windows 10/11 boots up slower than an octogenarian in the fast lane. I don't have to use Wincrap only for clients, but even after all of the so-called improvements of 7/8/10/11, it's a pig. I run Fedora normally and try to avoid the Microsoft mind virus at every corner, but still, you'd think they would improve it.
Wait... "Think of how much power you're consuming, MSFT! Think of the children, the trees, climate change."
There, that ought to get them to cut 20 sec off boot times.
Re: (Score:2)
Is your computer an octogenarian? With a decent CPU and NVMe the boot time is about 5-10 seconds unless you're logging into a domain, which will probably always take forever for no reason.
Re: (Score:2)
The latter and having an Octogenarian computer would mean vacuum tubes. And actually unless I do strip Windows down to minimums, it doesn't boot in 5 to 10 sec on a 14th gen i9 with a 4tb NVM; more like 2 min. It does use a "Microsoft Account." I've just given in to having to only use this craptacular OS on a minimal basis. . I'm 3 sec max on a similar system with Fedora 40. My desktop should just run, not be full of bloated shit, tracking me, constantly "Updating" with constant policy changes and tweaks be
Re: (Score:2)
I'd still like to know why Windows 10/11 boots up slower than an octogenarian in the fast lane.
Oh that's easy to answer: User error. When you don't break your OS in some silly way Windows 10 was objectively the fastest system to boot MS ever released. Windows 11 marginally slower.
If you're not from power button to functioning desktop within about 10-12 seconds you have yourself to blame.
a question for the ages (Score:2)
Discuss on Reddit.
It's all relative (Score:2)
I run Linux, so for me Windows 7 is a relatively new and modern OS.
This was fixed soon after release (Score:3)
I know it isn't popular here to RTFA, but "If you look at the timestamps on the articles, you can see that the problem was fixed in November 2009, just a few months after Windows 7 was released in July 2009."
So this was a problem for a couple of months 16 years ago. The summary really buried the lede here.
Heh... so a feature bug! (Score:3)
Anyone using Windows very often should be familiar with the way the OS isn't really fully functional/usable until you let it sit for a minute at startup. I'm using a 1 year old Thinkbook with 48GB of RAM and a fast 512GB SSD in it, plus Core i7 processor. And on this hardware, I've got to wait about that long after first signing in, before everything that's supposed to run in the background is really up and running properly, from Microsoft's Windows Defender antivirus to the Forticlient VPN software package, to Microsoft Teams and things like Adobe Creative Cloud's background app status monitor/updater.
Going with the single color solid background in Win 7 sounds like it just forced the issue of being more patient at startup before clicking on things and trying to use it.
disappointed (Score:3)
The article summary is bad, but the original blog post [microsoft.com] by Raymond Chen was informative. I came here hoping for a lot of dunking on Microsoft for writing code like this:
Windows 7 laptop (Score:2)