On Sat, 10/26/2024 7:58 AM, Newyana2 wrote:
On 10/26/2024 12:44 AM, The Horny Goat wrote:
I use a solid black background for my wallpaper since by default Win
10 uses white text for its descriptions of the icons and that's the
easiest way to read them.
In my experience, Windows will use white or black text, depending
on the image. Personally I'm mystified by the current console window
fashion of white on black. It seems hard to read and almost macabre
to me. Maybe it's all those movies where powerful computer code is
portayed as streaming quickly down a black screen as white text, so
that people end up thinking that white-on-black is "the real stuff".
My background image is a vast summer sky with cumulous clouds.
I find the blue cheerful and don't want excessive complexity in the
image.
I had a similar problem, though, with the boot screen not taking.
I finally just figured out where the images were, removed folder restrictions, and deleted everything except the image I wanted to use.
That worked.
Win10 is the most brittle Windows OS I've encountered.
I'm guessing that the extreme bloat/complexity has something to do
with it, combined with willy nilly dripfeed updates. Though once I got
things set up and blocked updates -- it's been stable since then...
Save for the one time I made the mistake of updating again. :)
The only other such weird instability I recall was one weird bug in
WinME, where every once in awhile the Desktop background would
just be gone. Instead there'd be a white screen with a red error
message. No apparent cause. Probably a minor coding error that
manifested if conditions were just right.
I've found it hard to figure out problems with Win10. The Personalize applet went dead. What's with that? Then the System applet went dead.
What's with that? Beats me. All from an update that supposedly wouldn't
even install. The only pattern I seem to find is that if I fiddle
with anything, something breaks. I couldn't even activate the system
until I re-installed and did it BEFORE I started tweaking. With Win10, Microsoft seem to be designing it more in terms of WaaS. They expect
to control it.
There is a difference in philosophy involved.
If you or I were designing the desktop background, we would:
1) Receive your request and record your picture choice, immediately,
in the registry. SilverLake.jpg .
2) Transformations (compensation for native resolution) can be
computed on the fly. The OS has the JPG-turbo library for example.
The current methods, they may start with a picture, the picture
is transformed into one directory. Transformed a second time into
another directory. Anonymized so it is not traceable. Then maybe
a registry entry points at the manufactured product. All the while
permissions are applied to the folder, making it tough for the
user to do this or that to it.
On the login screen, I tried to assign an image, and I (like a fool)
used a .bmp . Now .bmp is a native Windows thing, it isn't something
from outer space. The software "accepted" my choice -- it did not
immediately throw an error and say "dumbass, we only accept jpg and png".
It just ate my offering. But the next day when the login prompt is
presented, the screen is black. Which means my picture was not accepted.
Even though it is trivial to have an image library (like an irfanview)
that can deal with any image type, this process broke down for my choice.
The thing was, the image was a solid color, I want my solid colors on the desktop to be invariant (no round off errors in the math of a JPG
making color differences), and .bmp is one way of doing that. When I take screenshots and reduce to GIF compression, the color space reduction usually deals with the color space rounding errors of JPG, but I would rather know
in advance my picture is easy to compress.
Each "customization" then, is a complicated web of deceit, complete with lack of
immediate feedback to the user to "try again". Instead, we go the long-loop, wait for the user to discover "golly, that fucked up", then remember
where that dialog was again to try to change it.
What design school teaches this I wonder ? Devry Institute ?
During an update, system state can be modified, such as stopping
and starting services again. Some amount of the update happens during
shutdown (PendMoves, move files to final location), and some things
happen at startup. Through it all, services have been modified sometimes.
But, if before shutdown, you see things on Patch Tuesday that are malfunctioning, that means a service or one of its dependencies
has already been harmed and the issue should resolve on the reboot.
If it didn't resolve, you could use a DISM run to scan the package
state, and restore packages. Really, the old package version should
not be disturbed. It was creating a new version of one of a thousand
packages in WinSxS at the time. And in theory, just tidying up the
set of packages, and the pointer to which one loads, should be enough.
Then a hardlink needs to be crafted, from WinSxS to the file instance
in System32, to make the "OS image" in there.
If an OS update uses a temporary profile, it may need an extra reboot
to restore the pointer to the user profile. This means it may take
two reboots to return to normal operation. Not every Windows Update
uses a temporary profile. They were enamored with the concept at first,
then a few things broke and a few more things broke, and they are
a bit more careful now. Temporary profiles now, are used when they
are really needed.
Paul
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