Home windows 7 took ages to load in the event you had a strong background. Now we all know why

Home windows 7 got here onto the market in 2009 and put Microsoft again on the street to success after Home windows Vista’s annoying failures. However Home windows 7 was not with out its faults, as this curious story proves.

Some customers apparently encountered a vexing downside on the time: in the event that they set a single-color picture because the background, their Home windows 7 PC at all times took 30 seconds to begin the working system and change from the welcome display screen to the desktop.

In a current weblog put up, Microsoft veteran Raymond Chen explains the precise motive for this. In line with him, a easy programming error meant that customers needed to wait longer for the system in addition. After logging in, Home windows 7 first arrange the desktop piece by piece, i.e. the taskbar, the desktop window, icons for purposes, and even the background picture.

The system waited patiently for all parts to complete loading and acquired suggestions from every particular person part. Or, it switched from the welcome display screen to the desktop after 30 seconds if it didn’t obtain any suggestions.

The issue right here: The code for the message that the background picture is prepared was situated inside the background picture bitmap code, which signifies that the message by no means appeared in the event you didn’t have an actual background picture bitmap. And a single colour just isn’t such a bitmap.

The consequence: the logon system waited in useless for the message that the background has completed loading, so Home windows 7 by no means began till the 30 second fallback activated and despatched customers to the desktop.

The issue might additionally happen if customers had activated the “Cover desktop icons” group coverage. This was as a consequence of the truth that such insurance policies have been solely added after the principle code had been written and known as by an If assertion. Nonetheless, Home windows 7 was additionally unable to recognise this at first and due to this fact took longer to load.

Chen exhibits the next code snippet for instance as an instance the issue:

// Authentic code
InitialiseDesktopIcons()
{
    bind to the desktop folder
    enumerate the icons
    add them to the display screen
    Report(DesktopIconsReady);
}

// Up to date with group coverage help

InitialiseDesktopIcons()
{
    if (desktop icons allowed by coverage)
    { 
        bind to the desktop folder
        enumerate the icons
        add them to the display screen
        Report(DesktopIconsReady);
    } 
}

Unsolved for months

In line with Chen, it took a number of months for Microsoft to acknowledge the issue. In November 2009, it was then mounted by an replace and has not been an issue since, however is a pleasant anecdote for the varied errors that may happen throughout programming.

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