6 ms·
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 us
by PlunderBunny 2y ago
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.”
- omoikane 2y agoI still use a solid black background. I rarely see my background anyways. I do have a picture for my login screen though.
- Melatonic 2y agoGood 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).
- tracker1 2y agoI 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.
- seanthemon 2y agoAh! I can share something, you can setup an app called displayfusion to show satellite shots from google earth iirc, it's endlessly interesting
- AshamedCaptain 2y agoAnd reduce strain on the screen, and bandwidth when taking screenshots/screencasts..
- MisterTea 2y agoSolid black on all my systems save for Plan 9 Rio which is left default grey. I have windows open all the times so a background image is useless.
- gulikoza 2y agoWindows 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 :)
- ClassyJacket 2y agoI mean, you have to uncompress an image to display it anyway, so it would've made no difference.
- _nalply 2y agoThis assumes that memory for the system and the graphics card is shared.
- kevingadd 2y agoYeah, Windows in this era already had the concept of bitmaps in system memory and bitmaps in device memory, so the desktop background could have been decompressed into GPU memory and then thrown away to free up CPU-side RAM. Not sure whether it would actually do that though.
- numpad0 2y agoOr, that desktop rendering is not GPU accelerated.
- tom_ 2y agoBut the uncompressed data doesn't need to stick around. It could be uncompressed piece by piece into a much smaller temp buffer, with the revealed parts of the areas of interest copied into video RAM as necessary.
- theandrewbailey 2y agoWindows 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.
- lardo 2y agoI remember when I was a child, crashing my father's Windows 3 computer because I set all the desktop icons to animated GIFs!
- pwdisswordfishz 2y agoThat never happened.
- kachapopopow 2y agoYou could in fact make icons animated, they were not gifs as far as I remember and I can definitely see it crashing windows 3 with 2mb memory sticks. I still have those memory sticks laying around.
- jonathanlydall 2y agoI second the sibling comment that it was absolutely possible to have animated icons on Windows 3.1(1). I was only 11 or 12 at the time, but I distinctly remember the two Windows 3.1(1) machines in our school computer center having animated icons on their desktop in '93 or '94, but I know I couldn't do the same on my own PC at home, so they must have had some extra software installed to make that possible. My assumption today is that being so long ago it would be some other format, but Wikipedia says GIF format was released in 1987 so it might have been.
- ChoGGi 2y agohttps://winworldpc.com/product/icon-do-it/1x https://winworldpc.com/product/icon-do-it/1x
- Kuraj 2y agoYou could _do that_?
- SirMaster 2y agoI just use solid black cause it's less distracting than anything else for me.
- lukan 2y agoI mean, I started with Amiga and it had windows. But then DOS was next. But I always used black as the background for energy saving. I believe at least there black is more efficient.
- EvanAnderson 2y agoSort 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.)
- Melatonic 2y agoGood 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.
- EvanAnderson 2y agoI push down a solid color background w/ Group Policy everywhere I can. re: the RDP client settings - I can certainly control that. I just usually forget to. The default "Experience" setting for Microsoft's RDP client is "Detection connection quality automatically" and it has a much more optimistic view of "connection quality" than I do.
- bokohut 2y agoAs 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.
- t8sr 2y agoI 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.
- voidfunc 2y agoI just do it because I'm boring.
- dunham 2y agoI 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.
- mattl 2y agoAll my Macs running Mac OS X, iPhones and iPad have the same background color since Rhapsody DR2.
- Suppafly 2y ago> “it will draw faster and use less memory.” 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.
- Braini 2y agoIts also faster when used via Remote Desktop, VNC etc. so still doing it for these reasons.