In windows 7, during startup, why do my icons go blank and then reappear

Question

This morning I had to restart my windows 7 computer due to a security patch. As it was restarting, all the icons on the desktop appeared, then turned white and then the original images started reappearing. This is a common phenomenon after a restart and I've seen it other times (such as when I minimize all my windows). Can someone explain how this happens?

Solution 1

Hate to say it, but these answers are all wrong. :)

To stop icons from refreshing, hit the START button, and in the box at the bottom, enter "msconfig". Click on msconfig.exe (which launches System Configuration), click on the "services" tab. Scroll down the list and deactivate the "Server" service. Click "ok" and reboot computer. Voila - no refreshing of icons anymore.

Needless to say that the "server" service has a purpose (which is, I believe, to support file, print, and named-pipe sharing over the network), so you need to decide for yourself if you want to deactivate it. But this is the one that refreshes the desktop and makes booting up seem so incredibly slow.

Solution 2

This seems like you may have a lot of start-up processes and services starting up all at the same time. This is both very CPU and memory-intensive. So when Explorer is initializing, it is sharing the load, and Explorer and the svchost services associated with it likely take up the most resources. A few things you could do:

1. Limit the number of startup programs (Start-->Search Programs and Files-->msconfig, or from cmd, type msconfig, or create a text file, type msconfig, and save it as msconfig.bat and use it for msconfig from now on).

2. limit the number of startup services (msconfig)

3. Set the CPU priority for less important processes (Task Manager, right click on the process)

4. Set the affinity for less important processes (multi-processor machines---this sets the number of cores/processors and which to allow the service to use---also rt click in Task Manager)

Adding more RAM may help a little, but remember: anything is as fast as the slowest link, so if the processor can't buffer more than what you add, you'd be wasting money

Comments

[Admin]

It's completely normal. You'll notice the same effect when installing an application that affects file extensions, like Adobe Reader.

[henry700]

Before spending money, it is important to understand that there are certain types of operations which might make the computer appear to hang. If the computer hangs while it is refreshing icons etc, you will wind up with the icons looking weird. Typically, hardware operations with timeouts, cpu+disk intensives like virus scan can appear to pause the computer, also network adapters waiting for addresses etc.

[henry700]

check especially for software auto-update programs such as jusched, quicktime, and itunes which may be running at startup but before network connecivity is established.

[Doltknuckle]

I completely agree with @horatio and should reiterate that you should first look for software that you don't use which launches at start up. Hardware upgrades are a last resort.

[nixda]

smallvoid.com/article/winnt-services-lanmanserver.html

[Brokenstuff]

Probably the most interesting sub-question in this is WHY the "Server" service refreshes the desktop icons.