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.
It's because Active Desktop was essentially running an instance of Internet Explorer rendering to your desktop, of course it's slow and memory intensive.
Disabling Active Desktop and the fancy views on the left pane of Windows Explorer made Windows 98 change from quite slow to super responsive.
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.
Huge performance increase I still do (probably with negligible effects) was to manually set the disk cache (or whatever it's called - ram using HDD) to a set amount (usually double the ram). Letting windows manage it meant it was constantly changing in size and moving around the drive and with spinning disks killed performance. Also made defragging often mkre necessary. And of course disabling system restore.
I still do it out of habit with SSDs and I imagine it's mostly unnecessary but never ran into issues. I figure at worst it may increase the life of the SSD
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 ;)
Yeah, 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.
But 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.
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.
I 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.
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.
Anyone above the lowest pay grades gets categorized as some type of "expert". As the gov tries to justify higher pay to keep up with inflation and compete with private job markets, more people become categorized as "experts" to fill higher pay grades. (For perspective, you can't afford to live independently in the DC metro area unless you're in the top 1/3 of pay grades) I can totally see how someone throwing the term around could appear unhinged to an outsider, but the reality is that the US government as a whole lives in it's own unhinged little world.
I am not OP and I see nothing of the sort you are implicating. The writing is dry humor and funny. The expert repetition of the word "expert" for the obvious non-expert expert delivers a good bit of the story.
It's a bit dramatic, but "unhinged" is excessive. I imagine the repetition is a stylistic choice. It builds up the conclusion, and turns a one-line anecdote into a story.
I 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.
You 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.
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.
