WndSks Posted May 30, 2015 Share Posted May 30, 2015 Does anyone know how to remove/minimize the pointless overlay displayed when a user logs in for the first time? I'd like to start using desktop apps without having to wait for store apps I'm not going to use anyway... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TPreston Posted May 30, 2015 Share Posted May 30, 2015 Does anyone know how to remove/minimize the pointless overlay displayed when a user logs in for the first time? I'd like to start using desktop apps without having to wait for store apps I'm not going to use anyway... Its nothing to do with windows store apps, You can remove all of them bar the minimum and it will have no effect on the amount of time this takes. http://www.eightforums.com/tutorials/8806-first-sign-animation-enable-disable-windows-8-a.html You just get "preparing windows" then, What its actually doing is creating a new user account by coping the default profile ntuser.dat etc Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
siah1214 Posted May 30, 2015 Share Posted May 30, 2015 Yup, initial logon for Windows 7, 8, and 10 will take a long time. Windows 7 just sat at "Preparing Windows" for a long time, at least on 8 and 10 it tells you that it's doing something. The problem is that then you get self-described "power users" who don't actually know how Windows works thinking they should be able to skip it. Anibal P, TPreston and bluesman86 3 Share Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kozukumi Posted May 30, 2015 Share Posted May 30, 2015 Does anyone know how to remove/minimize the pointless overlay displayed when a user logs in for the first time? I'd like to start using desktop apps without having to wait for store apps I'm not going to use anyway... Is it really that much of a problem? Takes like 30 seconds. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
scumdogmillionaire Posted May 30, 2015 Share Posted May 30, 2015 Its just provisioning your account and stuff and a necessary step. Also, looks a lot better than the little dialog that used to popup in the top left corner on first log on. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
WndSks Posted May 30, 2015 Author Share Posted May 30, 2015 It happens on upgrades as well and the profile should already be in a usable state in those cases. (The overlay process is a child process of explorer.exe so it would be interesting to see what it looks like behind this screen) The overlay process hooks the mouse and keyboard to trap you, I'll see if I can cook something up to get around this... DeusProto 1 Share Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
xendrome Posted May 30, 2015 Share Posted May 30, 2015 AKA Break the upgrade before it's complete. siah1214, Ian W and bluesman86 3 Share Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
WndSks Posted July 10, 2015 Author Share Posted July 10, 2015 Because of the decent amount of builds lately I was able to come up with something. I made a little app that minimizes the fullscreen window (FirstLogonAnim.exe /RunFirstLogonAnim /explorer started by explorer). I am now able to see what happens behind it. First Windows does the old dialog in the left corner (ActiveSetup?) and then goes on to doing other stuff which I suspect is WinRT related (taskbar is visible at this point but tray icons etc have not loaded) and this is usually the point where the fullscreen window would display a message saying that it is taking longer than normal on some of my machines but the newer builds seem to be slightly faster so I have not investigated what exactly it is doing yet. Like I said previously, the fullscreen app hooks the keyboard and mouse to prevent you from doing anything but if you ctrl-alt-delete and choose taskmanager you can interact with it (because it is running at a higher integrity level I'm guessing) and then start cmd.exe that you can use while waiting. Explorer is not really usable at this point but other win32 apps work perfectly. Ian W and DeusProto 2 Share Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Aergan Posted July 10, 2015 Share Posted July 10, 2015 It's the replacement splash for "Setting up your profile" messages from previous NT incarnations - there's not a usable desktop at that point as it's upgrading or creating your user profile. You can crash out of it by attempting to spawn a login as SYSTEM on Windows 8.1, it's not pretty. TPreston 1 Share Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nick H. Supervisor Posted July 10, 2015 Supervisor Share Posted July 10, 2015 Going at this idea from a different direction, what is happening when the screens are saying, "preparing <x>/<y>/<z>"? What is being achieved by going around these screens? Why the need to bring hustle and bustle in to this relatively short timeframe? What are you gaining at the potential cost of causing issues with the system? Anibal P 1 Share Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
WndSks Posted July 10, 2015 Author Share Posted July 10, 2015 It's the replacement splash for "Setting up your profile" messages from previous NT incarnations - there's not a usable desktop at that point as it's upgrading or creating your user profile. The old dialog is still there during the first part before it moves on to whatever additional stuff it now needs to do in 8&10. Explorer is not usable because it is waiting for the splash screen but the desktop works (meaning, you can run apps and HWNDs can be created). I'm not really sure why everyone are so hung up on profile creation/upgrade, in theory your profile should work even if HKCU is basically empty and you are missing most of the subfolders. Profile subfolders will be created and registered in the registry when applications query for special/known folders. WinRT apps need their AppX junk in HKCU\Classes and you sometimes see a rundll32 process that updates the app registrations and notifies the startmenu so it picks up these changes but that is not a good enough reason to delay the first logon IMHO... Ian W 1 Share Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Seahorsepip Veteran Posted July 10, 2015 Veteran Share Posted July 10, 2015 That screen takes around 3 seconds for me, but I've got a pcie ssd +devHead 1 Share Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
WndSks Posted July 10, 2015 Author Share Posted July 10, 2015 Going at this idea from a different direction, what is happening when the screens are saying, "preparing <x>/<y>/<z>"? What is being achieved by going around these screens? Why the need to bring hustle and bustle in to this relatively short timeframe? What are you gaining at the potential cost of causing issues with the system? I'm not a fan of this dumbing down of Windows. If there was a small strip of text in the bottom corner telling you what exactly it is doing I would not be so upset and I would also be able to provide better feedback to MS when it is extra slow on some systems. Why would minimizing a window cause issues? Tray icons don't work and IShellWindows is probably not functional in the apps you start early but I'm mostly using cmd.exe and Notepad to tweak some things and they don't care about those shell things. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nick H. Supervisor Posted July 10, 2015 Supervisor Share Posted July 10, 2015 I'm not a fan of this dumbing down of Windows. If there was a small strip of text in the bottom corner telling you what exactly it is doing I would not be so upset and I would also be able to provide better feedback to MS when it is extra slow on some systems. Why would minimizing a window cause issues? Tray icons don't work and IShellWindows is probably not functional in the apps you start early but I'm mostly using cmd.exe and Notepad to tweak some things and they don't care about those shell things. I'm not a fan of dumbing things down either, but I really don't see these screens as dumbing things down. As I and others have said, the time these screens appear (first time use, only for a couple of seconds) are minimal, and I don't understand the benefit of doing it. Especially because I don't know what exactly is happening when they are there. I understand the basics - setting up your profile, taking your preferences and applying them to your new system/app, but I don't know what it's interacting with at the same time. Maybe by entering a command line you're going to ask the system to do something that will cause a priority issue and end up causing you problems somehow further down the line. If it's something that you want and have put together then you have my respect for finding a way of doing it. But I'll avoid this and stick with the way things are. Ian W 1 Share Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
WndSks Posted July 10, 2015 Author Share Posted July 10, 2015 I'm not a fan of dumbing things down either, but I really don't see these screens as dumbing things down. As I and others have said, the time these screens appear (first time use, only for a couple of seconds) are minimal, and I don't understand the benefit of doing it. Especially because I don't know what exactly is happening when they are there. I understand the basics - setting up your profile, taking your preferences and applying them to your new system/app, but I don't know what it's interacting with at the same time. Maybe by entering a command line you're going to ask the system to do something that will cause a priority issue and end up causing you problems somehow further down the line. If it's something that you want and have put together then you have my respect for finding a way of doing it. But I'll avoid this and stick with the way things are. How is it not dumbing down? It used to display the name of the component it was configuring and now it just displays "friendly" text with no technical information. I recently had a machine that stalled on a clean iso install on a screen that just said "Just a moment", how is that helpful? If it displayed some kind of progress status I would have a much better chance of diagnosing the issue. (Rebooted the machine the next morning and the install completed successfully) I understand why you don't want to try this on your machine and the app is not really ready for mainstream use but it is/was important for me because login took several minutes and I was testing software on multiple builds with multiple users... DeusProto and Ian W 2 Share Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Anibal P Posted July 10, 2015 Share Posted July 10, 2015 Sounds like an impatient "power user" looking for scapegoats and creating a useless "app" that has the potential to break more than do any real good, IF there was a real issue you will get a normal windows error Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DeusProto Posted July 11, 2015 Share Posted July 11, 2015 Yeah it makes no sense that this useless splash screen doesn't show you verbose details about what it's doing for debug purposes. You should be able to press Esc and be able to see very verbose details if you want but that'll likely never happen. Even BSODs display much less useful info since Windows 8. WndSks 1 Share Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
David-T-Rex Posted July 11, 2015 Share Posted July 11, 2015 Yeah it makes no sense that this useless splash screen doesn't show you verbose details about what it's doing for debug purposes. You should be able to press Esc and be able to see very verbose details if you want but that'll likely never happen. Even BSODs display much less useful info since Windows 8. The BSOD stuff should still be in the event manager or somewhere like that (i belive these get sent to MS) - and 99.999999999999% of the time its a driver thats caused the issue Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
siah1214 Posted July 13, 2015 Share Posted July 13, 2015 If someone cares enough about what caused a BSOD they'll be tech savvy enough to install blue screen view and look up exactly what caused it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MS Bob 11 Posted July 13, 2015 Share Posted July 13, 2015 What it is doing is it is copying the Metro/WinRT app from the default user profile/system user account to your newly created user account. Why I think it is doing this behind the "Hi...." overlay is because if I use PowerShell to uninstall many of those Metro apps, the time it does showing "Hi" after creating a new account is considerably reduced. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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