Microsoft shot real lasers through a window to make Windows 10's wallpaper — surprisingly the iconic art wasn't computer generated

Xatolos@reddthat.com to Technology@lemmy.world – 476 points –
Microsoft shot real lasers through a window to make Windows 10's wallpaper — surprisingly the iconic art wasn't computer generated
tomshardware.com
47

You are viewing a single comment

And then put it into an os that sloppily compresses its wallpapers before displaying them

this pisses me off so much. You can set an HDR wallpaper too, but only if you insert a special file into its place to trick Windows into working properly

Oh this unlocked a memory of the hassle I went through trying to get rid of jpeg artifacts on my wallpaper on windows 7. It really pissed me off.

You remind me of something different but related. I noticed in Windows 98 that it would store a different setting for BMP wallpapers. And BMP wallpapers would also load in faster. So when you first set a BMP wallpaper, and then change it to a JPEG, it would remembrr both of threm. And it will still briefly display the BMP one on startup before it loads the JPEG one.

The compression artifacts always led me to believe it was computer generated.

Literally why would it do that

It was written 25 years ago and untouched since probably.

Yes but why? Is it so less data can be stored on disk because compressing raster files absolutely does not make them easier to display.

Somebody told me that they always use a tiled wallpaper to preserve memory, once.

They were sort of an advanced user in the 90s, but haven't done much computer or engineering related work since then.

If we consider what machines Windows 95 ran on - not even that stupid. Back then.

It's kinda weird how much of a performance difference the wallpaper makes. I once installed Linux mint on an old laptop and the perf of managing windows and some other things was terrible until I changed the wallpaper to a plain color.

Meanwhile windows will still lag switching between desktops if they have different wallpapers, even on high end computers

After using Linux for a while all the window animations of windows start to look jarring too