Machines were often so slow back then, 30 second logins were 'normal' (or maybe even quick), especially once you load a bunch of crap like AV and other enterprise crap.

If I had dollar for every minute of my life I spent troubleshooting random group policy quirks during my previous life as a sysadmin...

> Personally, I use a solid color background. It was the default in Windows 95,¹ and I’ve stuck with that bluish-green background color ever since.

My thoughts exactly, but I think it goes back to the Mac LC's we used in a school computer lab, and the palette of colors you could have with 16-bit graphics was so vast compared to the 16 color PC's I was used to.

Plus, you always have so much stuff open you're never going to see your wallpaper anyway. That's what screensaver are (were) for that rotate through a folder full of images.