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Bug Windows Microsoft

Why Windows 7 Took Forever To Load If You Had a Solid Background (pcworld.com) 47

Posted by BeauHD from the more-you-know dept.
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.

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

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

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  • 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 (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Waffle Iron ( 339739 ) on Wednesday April 30, 2025 @11:55PM (#65343723)

    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.

    • 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...

    • 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

      • 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.

    • 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.

    • 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.

    • 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.

    • Not just MS's people, but every installed software. They all want their updaters and all sorts of other services.

  • Huh... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Waccoon ( 1186667 ) on Thursday May 01, 2025 @12:13AM (#65343739)

    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.

    • 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

    • 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.

  • 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)

    by dohzer ( 867770 ) on Thursday May 01, 2025 @12:39AM (#65343765)

    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.

  • 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)

      by burni2 ( 1643061 )

      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.

      • It doesn't say it in the article, but another post in the comments here said it was fixed 3 weeks after release.
      • It looks to me like if you set your desktop to a solid color the 'dumb' way - with a small (e.g. 2x2) bitmap of the color you want and let it get scaled or tiled - you would not get the delay.

    • Re: maybe not in all cases (Score:5, Informative)

      by henryteighth ( 2488844 ) on Thursday May 01, 2025 @02:31AM (#65343847)
      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."
  • 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 (Score:3)

    by Mirnotoriety ( 10462951 ) on Thursday May 01, 2025 @02:11AM (#65343831)
    > 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.

    • 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.

  • Code in an image file to indicate it has loaded?

    Microsoft hiring Poetering makes sense now.

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

  • Windows 7 (Score:3)

    by devious_malcontent ( 2752947 ) on Thursday May 01, 2025 @05:01AM (#65343983) Homepage
    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.
    • 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

    • 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

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      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.

  • 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

    • I have this complaint about any inordinately long timeout. One example is network timeouts. A packet travels around the world in less than a second, why is this thing waiting ten seconds plus to tell me the connection failed? Is there a case where a firewall grabs the SYN and then waits five seconds to forward it?

      • 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]

  • 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.

  • 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.

    • 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.

      • 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

  • Why, oh why, does an obsolete operating system boot slow?
    Discuss on Reddit.

  • 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.

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