Why Windows 7 Took Forever To Load If You Had a Solid Background

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.

Interesting

[diffract]

I don't put a background specifically to cause the desktop to load faster. I noticed one of the earlier Windows (3.1 or 95) loaded faster without a background, though I do it more now because an empty desktop feels more calm and minimal than one with a crazy background

Wouldn't matter today

[Waffle Iron]

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:

[KermodeBear]

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:

[Bert64]

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:

[supremebob]

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:

[usedtobestine]

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:

[RitchCraft]

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:

[thegarbz]

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 sounds like a *you* problem. Even my shitty work computer gets from cold boot to functional in under 30 seconds. My own desktop does it in closer to 10-15 seconds - and yes, fully functional including all network interfaces up and startup apps loading.

You broke something in your install.

Re:

[buck-yar]

Task Scheduler has many unneeded tasks run at boot and login time. You can go through and disable some of the items in there. Then in Services, stop unwanted services. This is less straightforward, sometimes things stop working if you disable a needed service. But with a little help from a few websites and some trial and error, you can pare this down to a minimal set of background programs.

Huh...

[Waccoon]

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:

[thegarbz]

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-exi

Re: Huh...

[Ilove_Noname]

Still run 7 ent on a lenovo x240, use a solid background have no issues at all with boot times. I'm guessing this only affects aero themes desktop profiles (which I disable asap once os is installed). I can load my machine in under 30 seconds.

Bug cameoflaged as expected behavior?

[Jeremi]

Did this bug go unrecognized for so long because nobody realized that a 30-second wait was not the expected behavior?

Privacy

[dohzer]

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

[PhantomHarlock]

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:

[burni2]

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:

[buck-yar]

It doesn't say it in the article, but another post in the comments here said it was fixed 3 weeks after release.

Re: maybe not in all cases

[henryteighth]

From the actual blog post, "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."

You get what you pay for...

[MEMEyou]

I suppose if I ever need free content, I can just query up old bug reports and talk about stuff that hasn't mattered for over a decade to a small group of people.

Code residing in wallpaper :o

[Mirnotoriety]

> The system waited patiently for all components to finish loading and received feedback from each individual component .. The code for the message that the background image is ready was located within the background image bitmap code ..

Explains how malware disguised as a .bmp file got onto the system.

Re:

[hackertourist]

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?

[JamesTRexx]

Code in an image file to indicate it has loaded?

Microsoft hiring Poetering makes sense now.

Re:

[Malay2bowman]

That wouldn't make any sense because that would mean that you couldn't use standard bitmap images as a wallpaper without "converting" them first to include this special embedded code. And there would be no benefit whatsoever in having it set up this way, except to malware writers. Clearly, they meant that the "message" was created and sent after the wallpaper loading routine had finished doing it's work and exited.

Re:

[buck-yar]

I think what they mean is the procedure that loads the bitmap to the screen, also alerts the desktop compositor its finished.

Windows 7

[devious_malcontent]

There you go! it's good to see people are still interested in Windows 7 even after almost 16 years since it made its debut.

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:

[buck-yar]

There's a constant trickle of people on reddit's windows7 sub that revert back to 7 (or at least build a machine to run it). Its not dead yet. With a handful of modern browsers still being developed for it (Supermium, R3dfox...), its still usable today. IMO other than not being able to run the latest software, its superior. The UI is better than what came later, more control over the OS, doesn't have the bloatware like AI or telemetry (if you don't install the spyware KB's). To many, its the peak Microsoft

Re:

[StormReaver]

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 h

Explains a lot

[pz]

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

windows 7 updates

[MONSTER_RANCHER]

what i remember the most was if you had more than 100 updates and less than 4g the updates would never get done, you just had to select less than 100 and do it in more than 1 or 2 reboots.