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

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