Let me start by saying I have a monster of a machine.  I use it for more demanding tasks than most people will ever ask their computer to do and it performs all of them admirably and quickly, all in 64-bit glory.  Then, I upgraded to Windows 7.

Now, at first, things were unbelievable and I was in love.  And truth be told, they still are and I still am, except during the boot sequence.  Whenever I boot, the OS takes forever to load.  It literally just sits, no disk activity, no notable processing, no informative messages on the screen, nothing.  And then, all of a sudden, everything loads almost instantly.  It’s almost as if there was an intentional delay or something.  Suspicious, right?

So I started researching this today.  I’m not exactly sure why it surprises me but apparently there is a bug in Windows 7 that causes a 30 second delay during boot if you use a solid color as your wallpaper.  Silly me and my minimalist approach looking for better performance.  I thought not loading a wallpaper would be easier for the machine to do than loading one.

I found the original article over on Lifehacker.  Within that article they provide links to a hot fix and some workarounds.  But I figured creating another article couldn’t hurt, just so people would know what was up.