Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

pcworld.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

371–380 of 1001 posts

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

#371

Post by maximus-decimus »

theandrewbailey wrote: post #64
bitwize wrote: post #29

This is one of the things that made people hate Vista. By default it was set to preload things into RAM in the background, gobbling up memory and potentially slowing the system down, both during the preload procedure and if you happened to want to run a program that the preload procedure didn't account for. Windows 7 was so good because it was Vista without (much of) the bullshit.

Windows 7 did the same thing. Windows 7 was perceived as better than Vista, in part because hardware and drivers had improved in the meantime.

At the end, my windows 7 machine would take an hour to boot if I remember right because Windows used 100% of my hard drive to do god knows what. Windows 7 at the end was literally unusable without an ssd.

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

#372

Post by LtWorf »

ohgr wrote: post #352
skissane wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our 12 year old recently switched from Windows to Ubuntu… and now I’m constantly getting these complaints “I can’t get screen capture to work under Wayland… I switched from lightdm to sddm and I can’t work out how to switch back… I accidentally started an i3 session and I can’t work out how to log out of it.” It makes me kind of miss Windows, in a way. It is good he’s learning so much. But the downside is Linux gives…

My Linux desktop experience... I started with Linux installing it from floppy disks in about 1996. In 1995, I was back on Windows 95 within a week because I needed to get something done. In 2000, I was back on Windows 2000 within a week because I needed to get something done. In 2005, I was back on Windows XP within a week because I needed to get something done. In 2012, I was back on Windows 7 within a week because…

Meanwhile people who actually get stuff done all use linux :D

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

#373

Post by bobmcnamara »

PuppetSoup wrote: post #221
rafaelmn wrote: post #187

At this point I view Windows as a legacy/compatibility OS, all the news about Windows is how they are making it worse for everyone. And using it now and then it feels like that too. Windows 10 Mail app had integration with system calendar, you would get itsycal built into the OS. Windows 11 removed that and made the OS Mail app spam infested shit, and they expect me to pay a subscription for something that comes bund…

> Linux desktop is getting better but I still wouldn't daily drive it, I'm genuinely interested what Linux is missing for you? I've been daily driving it for years and do all my work and gaming on it. Is it specific software or?

Frontend stability.

I've been through enough KDE, QT, and Gnome API changes. It's just not where I want to burn my limited time.

My first GDI programs still compile.

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

#374

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#375

Post by MSFT_Edging »

bigfatkitten wrote: post #255
rafaelmn wrote: post #187

At this point I view Windows as a legacy/compatibility OS, all the news about Windows is how they are making it worse for everyone. And using it now and then it feels like that too. Windows 10 Mail app had integration with system calendar, you would get itsycal built into the OS. Windows 11 removed that and made the OS Mail app spam infested shit, and they expect me to pay a subscription for something that comes bund…

I really want to like GNOME, but GNOME's developers have almost as much arrogance and contempt for their users as Microsoft. As an example, the power button can no longer be configured to power off the machine, because this is "too destructive". I'm not talking about defaults -- they removed the ability for me to make this choice for myself. Not even Microsoft has done that. https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id…

I've never been big on the Windows UI patterns but I recently started using KDE on one of my machines and it feels more polished than the Windows desktop. It has a few quirks but it's one of the most satisfying out-of-the-box desktops I've used, and I primarily use a niche dynamic tiling wm on all my other machines.

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

#376

Post by wodenokoto »

rafaelmn wrote: post #187

At this point I view Windows as a legacy/compatibility OS, all the news about Windows is how they are making it worse for everyone. And using it now and then it feels like that too. Windows 10 Mail app had integration with system calendar, you would get itsycal built into the OS. Windows 11 removed that and made the OS Mail app spam infested shit, and they expect me to pay a subscription for something that comes bund…

Explorer in windows 11 is truly death by a thousand needles.

Today I was manually sorting a bunch of files into folders that I had opened as tabs.

Drag file over tab, tab move and I now activate wrong tab.

Second try: drag file to where tab isn’t, such that the tab moves to where my mouse is. I now activate correct tab and can move the file to the designated folder. Single click the file and select a different file because file ends up at bottom of list when released, and then gets sorted after a second or two.

Click F2 to start renaming the file, click left to deselect and move cursor to the beginning of file name. Start adding text, only for the entire string to get selected and everything overwritten.

What a shit show.

/rant

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

#377

Post by dmos62 »

rafaelmn wrote: post #187

At this point I view Windows as a legacy/compatibility OS, all the news about Windows is how they are making it worse for everyone. And using it now and then it feels like that too. Windows 10 Mail app had integration with system calendar, you would get itsycal built into the OS. Windows 11 removed that and made the OS Mail app spam infested shit, and they expect me to pay a subscription for something that comes bund…

My view is the opposite. Windows has always been a technical laggard, but it's getting better. I wouldn't have used it as my daily driver 10 years ago, but I do now. Though, I don't want to overstate this, it's still archaic, it's just that programming ecosystems brought better support for Windows, UI got better, and general QoL improvements smoothed out some of the roughest edges.

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

#378

Post by MSFT_Edging »

skissane wrote: post #278
PuppetSoup wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Linux desktop is getting better but I still wouldn't daily drive it, I'm genuinely interested what Linux is missing for you? I've been daily driving it for years and do all my work and gaming on it. Is it specific software or?

Our 12 year old recently switched from Windows to Ubuntu… and now I’m constantly getting these complaints “I can’t get screen capture to work under Wayland… I switched from lightdm to sddm and I can’t work out how to switch back… I accidentally started an i3 session and I can’t work out how to log out of it.” It makes me kind of miss Windows, in a way. It is good he’s learning so much. But the downside is Linux gives…

> i3 session

Oh he'll figure it out eventually. This kid might be going places.

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

#379

Post by amiga386 »

alliao wrote: post #340
barrkel wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I came here looking for this. It's an old idea, from the days when spinning rust was the limiting factor - precache the binaries. If you ever tried Office 97 on a PC of 10+ years later, it's amazing how fast and lightweight it was. Instant startup, super snappy. And those apps were not lacking in features. 95% of what you need out of a desktop word processor was in Word 97.

some of the modern software is slower because someone made a poor decision to fetch something from the network on the critical path of main functionality... kills me

Example: https://old.reddit.com/r/libreoffice/comments/upf8nw/fixed_o...

Opening a spreadsheet, even if you don't want to print it, will hang for 30 seconds doing nothing, because LibreOffice will load the printer settings for the document, which means asking the printer, which if the printer is network-based and turned off, means a 30 second wait for a timeout.

Reported in 2011, still not fixed: https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=42673

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

#380

Post by LtWorf »

xattt wrote: post #349
rafaelmn wrote: post #187

At this point I view Windows as a legacy/compatibility OS, all the news about Windows is how they are making it worse for everyone. And using it now and then it feels like that too. Windows 10 Mail app had integration with system calendar, you would get itsycal built into the OS. Windows 11 removed that and made the OS Mail app spam infested shit, and they expect me to pay a subscription for something that comes bund…

The toolkit inconsistency between apps drives me crazy more than it should. Loading up a GTK app and switching to a Qt app is jarring, especially with basic things like a file picker. Daily driving desktop Linux feels like you are living in a lower-middle income family. Yes, you have some nice things, but you can usually tell they are cost-cut versions that have filler plates or missing features present on higher-end…

But there's plenty of GTK and QT applications running in windows. How do you cope?

Also osx the styling is all over the place, way worse than the occasional outlier in linux.

Post reply on HN