The Story Behind the Windows 7 Boot Animation

For a few years now versions of Microsoft Windows  have had very boring boot screens with either a scrolling or loading bar.

Microsoft decided that the “personality” of Windows was too boring so they worked hard to reinvent Windows. Microsoft started the reinventing of Windows at the boot screen. 

The Vista boot screen nicknamed, “The Boring Screen or Death”.

Microsoft knew that the theme and look of Windows determined users opinion of the operating system. During the development of the boot screen over 2 dozen boot suggestions where handed in. Designs varied in the saturation and/or brightness of color, the complexity of motion, and lighting effects. Here are some of the suggestions:

 

 

The final design has colours “chasing” each other around the screen that coming together and exploding to form the Windows logo. A small pulse continues to move after the colours have come together.

From a design perspective, Microsoft had perfected the Windows 7 boot animation, but there is the problem of speed. Most people care more about how fast the OS boots up instead of how cool the boot animation is.

Performance

 

If Microsoft had kept everything the same from Vista and simply updated the boot animation to the new Windows 7 look, Microsoft would not have achieved new levels performance and quality that they aspired to.  In fact, significant code changes were required in order to make the new boot animation even possible in Windows 7. 

In Windows Vista the boot loader uses a low resolution of 640x480 and the file that the green loading bar is in is very small. In Windows 7 the boot loader uses a higher resolution of 1024 x 768 and the files needed to load the boot animation are much larger. Since the native graphics driver for the display is not loaded into memory and initialized yet, the animation is run by using the CPU, and by updating the frame buffer for the graphics display. Microsoft had to achieve the boot speed increase be stripping down many of the processes that load during the boot.

Microsoft also increased boot time by removing the pearl animation. The pearl animation seemed outdated, and it was unnecessary to have a boot and pearl animation during a boot sequence. As a result one stage of the boot sequence was removed, which helped to increase boot speed.

   Vista boot

Windows 7 Boot

Many people have also been wondering what happened to the Windows start-up sound. In Windows Vista the sound has to be synchronized with the animation which took lots of time and power to do.

Omar Hoolgs

May 3, 2009