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Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup

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Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup

#241

Post by amiga386 »

What's old is new again.

Microsoft introduced the "Office Startup Assistant" or "Office Startup Application" (osa.exe) in Office 97, it sat in the system tray and loaded the main office DLLs at startup: https://web.archive.org/web/20041214010329/http://support.mi...

OpenOffice.org (predecessor of LibreOffice) copied this feature, which they called "QuickStarter", I don't know exactly when, but no later than 2003: https://www.openoffice.org/documentation/setup_guide2/1.1.x/...

Microsoft made OSA made non-default in Office 2007, and _removed_ it from Office 2010: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/office/o...

Are they now bringing it back?

Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup

#242

Post by geekifier »

jajko wrote: post #230
vjk800 wrote: post #192

I use Office software at work daily and I don't understand how that piece of shit can be so fucking slow. It's a serious productivity sink too; I often procrastinate small tasks just because I know half of the time doing it is spent waiting for various part of the office to load and that is somehow very stressful. I realise it is not a huge amount of time per se, but the psychological effect of the piece of crap stop…

If only slow... it has tons of accepted bugs and nobody seems to care. Yesterday I was using Outlook 365, there was one URL in one of the emails and I needed to find other emails containing it. Trivial and one of main use cases, right. Put URL in search box, 0 finds (including email I just copy&pasted it from). Mkay, maybe non-alphanumeric chars are messing with some internal regex or similar, stripped those into bar…

I use Mail.app on macOS as my daily these days, and it’s somehow even worse than this. Especially the search function, which works in even more bizarre ways.

It’s truly amazing that we have seemingly regressed in basic desktop functionality since the early 2000’s.

Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup

#243

Post by jeroenhd »

QuantumSeed wrote: post #175

I think Microsoft may doing that with Microsoft Edge as well. My Windows 11 Registry has an HKCU key called MicrosoftEdgeAutoLaunch_[...] "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft\Edge\Application\msedge.exe" --no-startup-window --win-session-start

Other operating systems do the same. Windows even has a dedicated system component built for the hard drive age that will load commonly used files of any type into RAM if you have some leftover.

Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup

#244

Post by tossandthrow »

Over the next 6 months I need to decide on the platform we roll out for our small startup.

Windows is categorically left out.

Funnily, it is probably going to be Valve that will be the death of Windows.

All my Steam games runs better on Bazzite / Steam OS without any Windows interruption. At some point, this will spread like a wild fire in the gamin community - teaching people about alternatives to Windows.

The next generation will not be bothered with Windows.

Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup

#245

Post by globular-toast »

bgro wrote: post #218
globular-toast wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if other industries could get away with this. Imagine a drug company that pedalled both a highly addictive toxin and the antidote.

What? This is what lobbying is. Intuit TurboTax. Realpage. Then entire insurance industry. TSA easy check or whatever it’s called. Fully fabricated problems with fabricated solutions often becoming legally required to be purchased to avoid the problem they cause in the first place.

> Then entire insurance industry.

Could you elaborate? How does the insurance industry create problems like bad weather and misfortune?

Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup

#246

Post by marcusb »

graemep wrote: post #229
worldsayshi wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is really missing for Linux desktop nowadays? Still drivers? And I guess office software and gui configurability.

Mostly games and photoshop. Libre Office is more than sufficient for most people. > gui configurability A bit confused by that. Linux desktop environments tend to be more configurable, and you can configure most things end users want to configure in a GUI with the major DEs. Do you mean the sysadmins cannot configure as much in a GUI? I think that probably is a major barrier as it means a lot of retraining. Also, whe…

Games? A good portion of the Steam catalog runs just fine on Linux.

Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup

#247

Post by probably_wrong »

sentientslug wrote: post #88
mrandish wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Windows startup is perfectly fine No... it's not fine. I don't reboot all the time for work or run a zillion VMs, I'm just a regular user. But sometimes when I'm rebooting - I need to get to necessary information quickly. Waiting 40+ seconds is an eternity when standing at an airport immigration counter pulling up a pre-filed form that they said I did not need to bring but which they're now demanding (because their…

Something is wrong with your computer if it takes 40 seconds, I have a similar samsung SSD and it takes like 20 seconds maximum from a cold boot to desktop on Win11

> Something is wrong with your computer if it takes 40 seconds

Yes, he just said it, it has Windows on it.

But more to the point: Windows slow boot has been a constant ever since the times when I would boot up Windows ME and go make myself a tea. If anything, Windows has always stayed one step of the technology that would bring its boot times down, to the point where I'd guess (as this article suggests) that it's company policy to dump slow components there.

Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup

#248

Post by jeroenhd »

LibreOffice has been doing this for ages, at least on Windows. It works well. And, to be honest, if you're going to be using Office anyway, you may as well speed up launching it.

I'm surprised they don't use the existing Windows Prefetching system for this, though.

Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup

#249

Post by graemep »

marcusb wrote: post #246
graemep wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mostly games and photoshop. Libre Office is more than sufficient for most people. > gui configurability A bit confused by that. Linux desktop environments tend to be more configurable, and you can configure most things end users want to configure in a GUI with the major DEs. Do you mean the sysadmins cannot configure as much in a GUI? I think that probably is a major barrier as it means a lot of retraining. Also, whe…

Games? A good portion of the Steam catalog runs just fine on Linux.

But not all of it, so if you want to play a particular game you might be out of luck.

Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup

#250

Post by _cenw »

It feels like different teams at Microsoft don't work with each other; they work against each other. I've noticed that too with Edge, it seems to be a competition at which team can put short term metrics (shopping and "creator following" vs privacy, shouldersurfing other search engines vs setting your search engine to bing) over respecting the user or engineering a coherent product.

Maybe stack ranking does create terrible culture.

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