Nicolas Alvarez wrote:

> I definitely remember Windows 98 slowly redrawing the desktop as if it was
> raytracing the damned wallpaper, while the hard disk made horrible
> insane-seeking noises.

I remember that, too. I attributed it to the Wallpaper being somewhat 
dispensable, and being swapped to disk as soon as memory was being 
needed by the application.

What was more likely happening is as applications are opened, and worked 
with, more memory is needed, and the least recently used block happened 
to be the wallpaper.

You minimize a few windows, The desktop is made visible again, 
Explorer's paint routine for the background is executed, it hits the 
image, and gets a page fault, Windows then gets that page from memory, 
GDI draws a bit of the image, hits another page fault, etc... until the 
image is painted in, All the while paging out more data from other apps 
to draw the background. These other apps may need the data just paged 
out, and so begins the harddrive-pounding swap.

Adding more RAM usually resolved the problem. ;) 3MB in a 16MB memory 
space is an awful heavy load on memory for something like a pretty 
background. (Based on a 1024x768 32bpp screen, not unheard of in those days)

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