Today I found out my Windows 7 PC had been taking 30 seconds (!) longer to boot because I use a solid color background (!)

I have always used solid color backgrounds for my Windows desktop, usually something really dark, like a very dark green or blue or even black, to minimize distraction.

It’s also a habit left over from the days when a fancy desktop background consumed precious memory and boot time from Windows.

Well, for some bizarro reason, Windows 7 (and Windows Server 2008) has this bug where if you use a solid color background, it stops and twiddles its fingers for a fixed 30 seconds at boot time.

When I read about it, I immediately benchmarked my Windows 7 box, and sure enough, my boot time was 50 seconds with my solid color background, and 20 seconds with Windows’ high-res wallpaper of a giant bale of hay.

Which answers a lot of questions I had about why it was taking so long for a quad-core computer with a high-performance solid-state drive to boot.

Obviously, this problem is easy to fix by using wallpaper – even if its an image of a solid color.

There is also a Microsoft hotfix – but I am not so big on installing a hotfix for something with such an easy workaround, and would rather wait for a fully-qualified update to fix it…