Why did Windows 7 log on slower for months if you had a solid color background?
113 comments
·April 28, 2025vlowrian
nandomrumber
I recently acquired a ThinkStation P910 dual CPU Xeon E26xx with 64GB RAM and 1080GTX
Quite a capable machine for my uses.
Not supported in Windows 11. Maybe with some additional config? Can’t be bothered with something hat might turn out to be fragile and need more maintenance than I can be bothered with. That’s a young man’s gane.
Ok, I’m about due to give Linux another tickle anyways.
Hmm, which distro… can always give a few a spin.
Keep it simple, Pop!_OS.
Installed fast, no issues, runs fine, stable. Seems entirely usable.
Customisations? Nah, keep it simple.
I’ll set a black background though.
Nope.
RedShift1
Par for the course with Gnome though, if you like customization, KDE is better.
loftsy
Just make a black png and use it as the background?
doublerabbit
Sure but why should a workaround be required for a feature that should work?
methuselah_in
go with gnome fedora! and rest will be history or debian stable.
ohgr
As much as I'd like a machine like that, my 5 year old random Lenovo 10500 desktop is probably more useful as a daily driver machine than an older workstation class machine at the sacrifice of no ECC RAM. I bought it when it was 3 years old and will use it for 4 years then get rid of it before it hits the tail end, the power supply dies or something else goes wrong. You avoid all the weird problems, the depreciation, the energy costs running like that. And you gain things like relatively competent NVMe slots, USB-C and other luxuries. And the single core performance is better than Xeons of the era and earlier.
win11 ltsc works perfectly on it. With a solid background :D
MartinGAugustin
Replace Windows. Alternative Operating System (OS), for Performance computing.
Based on: Arch. Init: systemd. https://cachyos.org
Based on: Debian. Init: Non-systemd. https://www.devuan.org
Based on: Arch. Init: systemd. https://garudalinux.org
Based on: Independent. Init: Non-systemd. https://www.gentoo.org
Based on: Red Hat Fedora. Init: systemd. https://nobaraproject.org
anal_reactor
[flagged]
jraph
KDE Plasma (on any distro I guess) has clear, easy to reach and easy to use settings for this.
necovek
It's funny to see this: after avoiding the Windows world for the last 25 years, back in the corporate world in the last few, I see this pattern with Microsoft tools all the time.
Teams not loading due to security issues, but notifications coming through with full content of messages. Ability to type a handful of words in cloud version of Word (or paste full documents) before security check catches up and requires me to set up a sensitivity label. Etc.
It mostly tells me about MS doing very bad software architecture for web apps, though apparently the desktop apps are not immune to it either.
Enginerrrd
It's not just MS. I think they might have fixed it now, but my personal favorite was when Google photos would send me a notification with a preview of an AI generated album of my photos they made for me even though the app did not now, nor ever have permissions (on Android) to look at said photos. And it too would then "catch up" and ask permission to see my files and I'd say "no" and then the preview would go away.
kn0where
Similar with google docs, if you share a link to a doc, even if the doc is restricted access, anyone can see the thumbnail icon with the contents of page 1.
harrall
I swear 70% of my value at work is pointing out details like this during meetings when no one else will… before we build it.
necovek
In this particular issue, MS has an opposite problem: you grab a document link, grant a permission to someone, and they still can't access the document through the original link (you need to fetch a new link just for them).
jkaptur
Really? That’s very surprising. You can see what this says? https://docs.google.com/document/d/1uYM0vyZiDJbo-5mXmU_6Xtrz...
dns_snek
That's odd, were you synchronizing your photos to Google Photos[1] in any way, from any device? Presumably they would've had to be synchronized to Google at some point for them to generate an album of said photos.
chii
The team that wrote the preview portion of the app is a different team to the one that wrote the permission requesting part. They communicate asynchronously (as a team/org, but this probably is reflected in the app's architecture!), which means the outcome is eventually consistent! But you managed to observe one of those inconsistent cases!
xigoi
“Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure.” —Melvin Conway
rob74
Then maybe the default value for "permission to access photos" should be no, so they can only start accessing them after you give them permission. But yeah, with stuff like this it's always "opt-out", never "opt-in", unless someone forces them to...
garbagewoman
The team that wrote the preview portion just accessed the photos with elevated permissions if permission wasn’t granted yet? That doesn’t make any sense
mbrumlow
Yah. But I would think the permissions would be a OS level thing that can’t be bypassed simply because Google also wrote the app.
necovek
Yes! So many times observed that there is a name for it (Conway's law), teams having limited touchpoints obviously leads to such impedance mismatches.
fhd2
I like to joke that Microsoft stuff is always 80%. Works very well for the obvious use cases, but then you are bound to run into weird issues as soon as you run into some edge case they haven't covered.
Makes me think it must have something to do with their corporate culture and how they work, since their developers, to my knowledge, never had a reputation for being weak. Maybe it's just because they have such a gigantic user base for everything they do, that 80% is the best business value. Though I doubt that a bit, as a third party developer, it makes me avoid their products where I can.
cornholio
The most annoying one is that Windows machines have lost the ability for deep sleep. Laptops that slept perfectly 5 years ago are now left as 24/7 zombies, with the CPU, fans and hard disks running non stop.
I'm certain that some idiotic change just like the ones suggested in the article destroyed this perfectly working feature, and nobody is bothered to fix it because it would impact the latest harebrained scheme to make my 10 year laptop do AI in its sleep and suggest helpful ads about the things it couldn't help overhear while "sleeping".
Peanuts99
I'd be willing to bet this is more to do with chipset drivers and associated software than Windows itself.
cornholio
You may lose that bet. Nobody is writing or pushing driver updates for 10 year old hardware, yet Microsoft's strategy to cripple S3 sleep to compete with mobile OSes is well documented, with the, again, widely documented effect of setting on fire laptops their owners believed were "shut down".
Moru
I have never had a windows computer that was able to do any sort of sleep without crashing, either in the sleep mode or randomly a time after waking up. First thing I do is disable it, I have lost enough time trying to find the cause of it and the crashes usually stop if I don't use sleep modes.
Most of my computers and friends computers have been ASUS though, maybe that is a connection.
(Windows user since 3.11 but I don't think those had sleep modes :-)
lewantmontreal
They do have some sort of sleep but its very inefficient so Lenovo Thinkpads actually go into hibernation after an hour or so of sleep, to avoid the user waking up to an empty battery.
bartread
This has given me flashbacks. I went down this rabbit hole prepandemic with a Dell laptop I had for work at the time. I got tired of getting on the train to find my laptop dead.
Back then Windows would default to a crap version of sleep but you could still disable it in the BIOS and by tweaking a couple of other settings, thus forcing it to use proper sleep. I’m pretty sure I wrote a lengthy response on HN about this including the specifics at the time.
That worked well until I got a new Dell laptop that removed support for the good sleep mode entirely.
So then I’d make sure to always leave the machine plugged in and switched on overnight before any travel… which is how I discovered that the machine had a bug where sometimes it would fail to charge whilst plugged in and switched on but not awake, so occasionally I’d still end up with a dead laptop on the train.
So then I’d start up the machine as soon as I got out of bed so it’d get at least 30 - 45 minutes of charging with not much load on it whilst I was getting ready to leave.
I absolutely hate Dell.
For my own use I’ve been buying Apple laptops since 2011 and, although they went through a grim period meaning I kept a machine from 2015 to 2024, I never had this sort of nonsense with them.
jacobgorm
Or why your software should never use arbitrary timeouts. Without the 30s timeout this bug would have been caught and fixed before release.
analog31
This relates to something that might have started around that time: The practice of displaying the splash screen for a finite time period, then showing the user environment before the software was fully started. It was suspected that both OS's and apps were doing this, because people notice when "the app takes too long to load."
Now you have to guess whether the software has really loaded or not before you start using it.
cosmicgadget
Or, in the corporate information systems world, we have to wait for the half-dozen security and monitoring systems to get done scanning memory and blocking while painstakingly logging to the clould. Only then do you get to watch a catatonic UI thread idly wait for every last piece of the underlying software to load.
ffsm8
Not only do they forbid devs to use Linux on their dev machines, they then proceed with cb.exe etc. Nothing shows how they value your time quiet as much as these artificial slowdowns they love to introduce. (Along with gigantic privacy issues, as it allows the employer to essentially look at a live feed of your desktop whenever they want)
I could understand it if your device needed special access (VPN to prod etc), but you usually can't do that either from the dev machines - and need to first connect to a virtual machine (via browser or rdp) to be able to do that...
analog31
Yes and everything hangs because the security software is the last to load.
grishka
It's clear to me that the intent with this 30-second timeout was that it's better for you to have a possibly half-broken but at least somehow usable desktop than be stuck with the loading screen forever, having to boot into a different OS to try to fix your main one.
chii
> showing the user environment before the software was fully started.
and it has migrated to web apps today - where doing something causes the UI to show a loading/progress wheel, but it takes forever in actuality (or on start up of the webpage, you get a blank screen with placeholder bars/blurred color images etc).
And this is the so-called responsive design...
forgotusername6
What would you suggest? Is it better to wait until the whole app is loaded to show anything? Or is the only solution to fix loading times in the first place?
arkh
> Or is the only solution to fix loading times in the first place?
Ding! Ding! Ding! We got a winner!
Yeah, maybe we could expect machines which got 40 years of Moore's law to give you an experience at least as snappy as what you got on DOS apps.
Aanok
I think at the very least individual widgets should wait to be fully initialized before becoming interactable. The amount of times I've, say, tried to click on a dropdown menu entry just to have it change right under my cursor making me click on something else because the widget was actually loading data asynchronously, without giving me any notice to the fact at all, is frankly ridiculous.
It's the right thing to do to load resources asynchronously in parallel, but you shouldn't load the interface piecemeal. Even on web browsers.
I'd much rather wait for an interface to be reliable than have it interactive immediately but having to make a guess about its state.
tonyedgecombe
I'd be happy to get a progress wheel, half the time it is a blank page.
cowsandmilk
Eh, in a case like this, without the 30 second “assume loaded” timeout, the system would be forever stuck in the loading screen for those impacted by the bugs. Sometimes it is better for your users to be optimistic that the system did indeed load.
mattnewton
Then maybe they would have caught the error in a preview release / QA
analog31
Of course I'm not your typical user, but I'd rather see the error log.
est
Offtopic I really liked the auto-refreshing "Windows Spotlight" wallpaper on logon screen. I even wrote a script to sync it as my desktop wallpaper.
But on my Win10 it stopped working idk why, so I wrote a script to download Bing Image of the Day instead: https://blog.est.im/2025/stdout-03
xnx
There's an official Bing Wallpaper App (https://www.bing.com/apps/wallpaper) for this, but it has all kinds of nuisances / dark patterns to switch your default browser to Edge and other nefarious things.
est
there's RSS and JPEG directly available for download so nah, I'd stick with few lines of script instead of a bloated app.
Kholin
On KDE Plasma, that's a built in feature.
est
win7 used to support dynamic wallpapers with an RSS inside some .theme file. It didnt last long. Looks like the hole "theme" idea was abandoned by Microsoft.
Then we have double context menus on Win11. Sigh!
adithyassekhar
11 can set spotlight as the desktop wallpaper.
90s_dev
> Also, I tend to stick with default configurations because it makes bug filing easier.
I've learned to use default configurations pretty much everywhere. It's far too much of a hassle to maintain customizations, so it's easiest to just not care. The exception is my ~50 lines of VS Code settings I have sync'd in a mysterious file somewhere that I've never seen, presumably on github's servers, but not anywhere I can see?
skydhash
I only depends on an handful of tools (emacs, vim, lf, mpv, fish, foot,…) so I took the time to configure them and then just store the config in a git repo I sync everywhere. For personal computers I use stow. For remote machines, I just copy-paste. The nice thing is that those tools are so stable I could move to Debian stable and be OK.
TheDong
Reproducible self-contained configurations give most of the same benefit for bug filing.
Just your regular reminder that nix is good actually.
"I have a bug, you can get a full VM that reproduces it with 'nixos-rebuild build-vm --flake "github:user/repo#test-vm" && ./result/bin/run-*-vm'"
And the code producing that VM isn't just a binary blob that's a security nightmare, it's plain nix expressions anyone can read (basically json with functions).
And of course applying it to a new machine is a single command too.
nothrabannosir
<3
(Would it be pedantic of me to say that I receive my fair share of bug reports on nix code I maintain, and when someone sends me their entire nixosConfig the very first thing I do is punt it back with a "can you please create a minimal reproducible configuration"? :D but your point stands. I think. I like to think.)
eviks
Using bad defaults is also a hassle, and you do it way more often than maintaining customizations
akst
Even the best crafted systems, I think you'll also find there are just more synergies between different system features in the default configuration.
squigz
> It's far too much of a hassle to maintain customizations
Is it? The vast majority of the time, I change settings/set things up the way I want, and then... leave them for literally years. Hell, I can directly restore a backup I have of Sublime Text from years ago and my customizations will work.
optymizer
It is. I used to customize everything. On Windows 95/98/2000/XP - custom cursors, themes, icon packs, custom Windows loading screen, the works. When I used KDE (and Gnome for a while) and compiz came out, I enjoyed flaming windows. Same story - custom icon packs, make grub menu look nice, hell, custom kernels compiled for my CPU, etc.
Somewhere along the way I lost interest in customizing the OS. These days I routinely switch between MacOS, Windows and various Linux flavors on lots of computers. The only thing I may customize is I write my .vimrc from memory.
On my Android phones, I change the wallpaper and I disable animations. Otherwise, stock everything.
Now that I think about it, it can't be the time saved, surely I waste more time on HN. It likely correlates more with using computers for work as opposed to for fun and learning. Even the learning I do these days is rather stressful - if I can steal an hour or two on the weekend, I feel lucky, so spending time to customize the environment seems like a waste.
Maybe if life slows down, I'll find joy in customizing my OSes again.
90s_dev
Yes, I have the same history customizing everything! From Windows 3.11 to XP to Linux, and then giving up because life gets busy.
On the note of programming not being fun anymore, that's exactly why I'm making my secret project that I hope to release very very soon, maybe in a week or so. I want to make programming fun again, in a similar way that pico8 did, but x100.
Larrikin
Eh, I find a computer not customized to my work flow to be a waste of time. The amount of time I spend using someone else's computer is such a small amount of time.
90s_dev
Most of the time, yes. I maintained my vimrc for maybe 10-15 years before I gave up on it.
The hard part of maintaining a config is that there's no such thing as cost-free usage, it always takes a mental toll to change a config, to learn a new config, to remember which configs are in use and what they do, to backup configs, or at least to setup and maintain a config-auto-backup flow.
By far, the easiest mental model is just learning how everything works out of the box, and getting used to it. Then again, sometimes what people want is to do things the hard way for its own sake. That's probably part of why I kept going back to C over and over for so many years.
3036e4
I don't know vim well. Why is it not easy to just keep using the same settings?
The oldest parts of my emacs config go back at least 30 years and I have had it in a git repo for ~15. I keep my entire .emacs.d versioned, including all third-party packages I depend on (so no fetching of anything from the cloud).
Have had to do at most minimal changes when upgrading to newer versions and with some tiny amount of work the same config still works for emacs from around version 21 to 31 (but features are of course missing in older versions).
lp0_on_fire
Agreed. I had a professor once who would say “The defaults were put there by people who probably know more about the software than you”. As long as you understand what the defaults are doing sometimes it’s more hassle messing with every option under the sun.
meroes
Same except my teacher’s version was “just hit next/yes” for every option when installing software, in an era before that’d get you Adobe Reader and McAfee malware.
userbinator
These days the defaults are almost certainly oriented towards controlling or extracting the most value from you, be it invasive spyware, constant intrusions, or sub-optimal UI.
bandie91
those are the same people who let the user change those settings.
user3939382
It’s probably best decided as a function of frequency. For tools I’m using every day, I know every setting.
alex-mohr
The code in question reminds me a lot of my favorite Kubernetes bug:
if (request.authenticationData) {
ok := validate(etc);
if (!ok) {
return authenticationFailure;
}
}
snackbroken
This is a nice example of why one should parse, not validate. If every function that requires some kind of permission takes that permission as an argument, say (pseudocode)
void doFoo(PermissionToDoFoo permission, ...){...}
from request import getAuth, respond
\\ Maybe<AuthenticationData> getAuth(Request request)
\\ void respond(String response)
from permissions import askForPermissionToDoFoo
\\ Maybe<PermissionToDoFoo> askForPermissionToDoFoo(AuthenticationData auth)
response =
try
auth <- getAuth(request)
permission <- askForPermissionToDoFoo(auth)
doFoo(permission)
"Success!"
fail
"Oopsie!"
respond(response)
jve
Where can I read about the bug? And what is the bug? If there is no authenticationData it is authenticated by default or what?
DHRicoF
I don't know where you can read about this, but you are in the good track
If there is no authenticationData then the if !Ok is never run and the code continues execution as it were authenticated.
grumpyprole
The way software is built hasn't changed in decades.
josephg
To me, this falls in the category of bugs I think of as "systemic bugs" or "type bugs". If login components were passed a token, then you could make the token's destructor automatically flag that the process is done. Then this bug would be more-or-less impossible to write.
Because they made it a runtime thing - "components just have to remember to do this", the code structure itself affords this bug.
There was a similar bug at facebook years ago where the user's notification count would say you had notifications - and you click it, and there aren't any notifications. The count was updated by a different code path than the code which inserted notifications in the list, and they got out of sync. They changed the code so both the notification count & list were managed by the same part of the system, and the all instances of the bug went away forever.
nly
Bad notification icons happen on Reddit all the time. I've always assumed it was just bad caching
sightofcorbie
“Comfort food”. That’s so funny. I still use motif window manager with steelblue4 desktop and wheat xterm background since aix into Linux. That was my first default in 1989 college and nothing has improved since. (Gnome, kde and the like make me want to upchuck).
CorpOverreach
My "comfort food" in this article is the realization that no matter how big, how advanced a team can be -- we all make (and ship) really dumb changes to production. A bolted-on wrapper if() statement that spans a bit too far is classic.
flomo
You just have awful taste, but so do a lot of my friends. :)
kirenida
"Nothing has improved since". That's so funny.
toast0
What's the biggest thing that's improved? We have 4x the pixels, so we spend 4x the rendering time to draw everything with 4x as many pixels, when it works, and complain when it doesn't.
Would have been easier to stick with the pixel density we had.
Oh, and we have to wait a frame to see everything because of compositing that I still don't quite understand what it's supposed to do? Something something backing store?
90s_dev
I have a certain nostalgia for bb4win, which I learned about during college, and was my first introduction to linux. Nostalgia is a powerful drug.
ryao
What will you do when you want to use a 4K monitor? This is not to be dismissive. I am genuinely curious if HiDPI works on motif.
tedunangst
You would set an appropriate size in .Xresources or somesuch.
suyula
I can't speak for Motif but Fluxbox works fine on my 4K monitor
pdpi
A bit meta, but I've come to look forward to the "Why did <bizarre behaviour> happen with <windows version>" headlines that herald a Raymond Chen post. These are always fascinating.
redbell
As a software developer, I’ve occasionally felt ashamed when it takes me hours—or even days—to fix a stubborn bug. But whenever I see that even big tech companies struggle with similar issues, I regain confidence in myself. After all, this is what being a software engineer often looks like: wrestling with unpredictable behavior until something finally clicks.
Just yesterday, I ran into a bizarre bug on Windows where the mouse cursor would move every time I pressed the arrow keys—almost like I was controlling the mouse with the keyboard. It drove me nuts. I checked all the usual mouse and keyboard settings, but everything looked normal. At one point, I even wondered if my machine had been infected by a virus.
Desperate, I Googled "mouse pointer moving on arrow keys". The first result had only one answer, which blamed... Microsoft Paint. I was skeptical—Paint? Really? That couldn’t possibly be it. Still, with no other leads, I gave it a shot. As it turned out, I did have Paint open in another Desktop View, where I’d been cropping a screenshot. The moment I closed it, the problem vanished. Instantly.
I still can’t believe that was the cause—and I’m a little embarrassed to admit it, even though no one was around to see it.
_____________________
1. https://superuser.com/questions/1467313/mouse-pointer-moving...
dankwizard
Ah, the glamorous life of a software dev—where we spend half our time building the future and the other half wondering why the future’s on fire.
Years ago, I had a bug so bizarre I nearly convinced myself the machine was haunted. My mouse pointer started drifting—not randomly, but only when I pressed the arrow keys. Up arrow? Cursor nudged north. Down arrow? There it went again. I was convinced some accessibility setting or keyboard remap had gone haywire. I rebooted. I checked drivers. I even briefly entertained the idea that my codebase was cursed.
Three hours in, I realized the true culprit: MSPaint. I had opened it earlier, and because the canvas was selected, the arrow keys were actually moving the selection box—which, by delightful Windows design, also moved the mouse cursor. I wasn’t losing my mind. Just... slowly drawing rectangles in the background every time I hit an arrow key.
I closed MSPaint, and poof—my “haunting” ended. I haven’t trusted that application since. Great for pixel art, less great for your sanity.
------------
You and ChatGPT sound identical.
shriracha
Great read. Raymond Chen's blog is absolutely legendary.
As someone who prefers a solid color background, I’m always surprised by how often this simple preference leads me into bizarre rabbit holes.
Some additional examples beyond the OP:
- In the latest macOS, trying to set a custom solid color background just gives you a blinding white screen (see: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/256029958?sortBy=rank).
- GNOME removed all UI controls for setting solid color backgrounds, but still technically supports it if you manually set a bunch of config keys — which seem to randomly change between versions (see: https://www.tc3.dev/posts/2021-09-04-gnome-3-solid-color-bac...).
The pattern here seems pretty clear: a half-baked feature kept alive for niche users, rather than either properly supporting or cleanly deprecating it. Personally, I’d love to simply set an RGB value without needing to generate a custom image. But given the state of things, I’d rather have one solid, well-maintained wallpaper system than flaky background color logic that’s barely hanging on.