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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.”
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 :)
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:
“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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ;)
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Readit News
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.
And I thought browsers highjacking the scrollbar was bad!
Oh the memories of playing with java.awt.Robot...
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.
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.
155 points - 25.May.2009 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=625957
493 points 4.Jan.2014 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7011228
I wonder what the cause is/was.
I'm aware that old PS/2 connectors would interrupt, vs being polled like USB.
- 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...
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”.
Deleted Comment
After Dark allowed everything.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_gray
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.)
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.
I do have a picture for my login screen though.
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.
But I always used black as the background for energy saving. I believe at least there black is more efficient.
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/