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

pcworld.com

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

#461

Post by dns_snek »

101008 wrote: post #437
sgarland wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s because modern devs by and large have zero concept of latency differences. I had to explain to people yesterday why an on-disk temporary table in MySQL was slower than an in-memory one. “But the disk is an SSD,” was an actual rebuttal I got. Never mind the fact that this was Aurora, so the “disk” is a slice of (multiple) SSDs exposed over a SAN…

That is what happens when your dev learnt it from an online course instead of going to college or through proper education. "Anyone can code!"

And I thought we were past this sort of gatekeeping and elitism. I've worked with people who had a master's degree in CS who couldn't code their way out of a wet paper bag. In my experience there's very little correlation between how someone learned programming and how deep their understanding of the entire stack is.

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

#462

Post by kyrra »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #408
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.

I wish companies would go back to building fast apps, but alas. Everything is feature-packed and requires you to download half the internet. My intellij license just expired so today I'm back using Sublime Text, and honestly it's a breath of fresh air / relief - and it's not even the fastest editor, iirc it uses Python under the hood. I've installed Zed but getting plugins and keyboard shortcuts all lined up is alway…

If you like fast apps, maybe check out FilePilot, a Windows explorer alternative.

https://filepilot.tech/

It's amazingly fast, though it's missing some features and will be really expensive when it leaves beta.

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

#464

Post by formerly_proven »

tremon wrote: post #436
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish companies would go back to building fast apps, but alas. Everything is feature-packed and requires you to download half the internet. My intellij license just expired so today I'm back using Sublime Text, and honestly it's a breath of fresh air / relief - and it's not even the fastest editor, iirc it uses Python under the hood. I've installed Zed but getting plugins and keyboard shortcuts all lined up is alway…

I don't think these apps were ever built to be fast, they were built with the resource constraints of the time. Moore's law is what's making these apps fast.

Word 2000 definitely was not very quick on a contemporary office PC (Pentium II or III), though I'm pretty certain it was much, much faster than desktop O365 is on a contemporary office PC today, despite those being >100x faster. So Fermi would estimate modern office to probably require at least 1000x more resources than Office 2000.

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

#465

Post by eastbound »

avidphantasm wrote: post #330
geekifier wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Spotlight search on macOS is in general kinda…spotty. Now that we have super fast SSDs it should be instantaneous very reliable. How hard can this be? BeOS seem to have figured it out 30 years ago. Apple missed a chance to fix this once and for all when APFS was developed, but they are fat and happy, no fire in their guts. Craig Ferengi must go.

What’s infuriating is, `find` and `grep` are snappy, they find everything you need in microseconds per gigabyte, and they have no index!

If the macOS or Windows searches were just wrappers for find/grep, it would already be an improvement!

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

#466

Post by mcv »

windward wrote: post #354
o11c wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be even more clear, LibreOffice also has a splash screen. I haven't run it this boot, and I just timed myself taking 7.5 seconds to start Writer, close the welcome popup, and quit. By feel, about half of that was waiting for the loading bar and the other half was figuring out how to dismiss the welcome popup. On a hot start, with several attempts it takes between 2.1 and 2.5 seconds to start and quit it. For some…

LibreOffice also sucks in this regard. 'Hey, I'm loading! I'm going to steal focus from whatever else you're doing and make your taskbar flash! No, that doesn't mean you can give me any input yet' I'd really like to own a device that can multitask, one day.

I have this issue with lots of applications: taking focus away from something I'm using, but not being ready to be usable. Apps shouldn't take focus until they're ready.

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

#467

Post by henry_springs »

smackay wrote: post #189
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…

Microsoft at least sees the writing on the wall... Microsoft announces new European digital commitments https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2025/04/30/europea...

"Microsoft has a demonstrated history of pursuing litigation when that has been needed to protect the rights of our customers and other stakeholders. (...) When necessary, we’re prepared to go to court."

This is convincing. Or would be, if the present challenges wouldn't extend to the court system itself.

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

#468

Post by lolinder »

amiga386 wrote: post #241

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: htt…

Yeah, I'm honestly trying to figure out why this is getting so much attention. Applications setting themselves to start up at login in order to avoid doing a bunch of work when they're asked for later is one of the oldest patterns in Windows. It's annoying to regularly have to go in and clear out new startup applications, but it's been part of maintaining a Windows machine for decades, and Microsoft Office is hardly the worst offender.

Why is HN suddenly so interested in Microsoft doing the same thing that has always been done by large, bloated app suites?

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

#469

Post by ii41 »

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…

Wait, I have the impression that water torturing is either US or Soviet invention?

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

#470

Post by osigurdson »

sgarland wrote: post #382
alliao wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It’s because modern devs by and large have zero concept of latency differences. I had to explain to people yesterday why an on-disk temporary table in MySQL was slower than an in-memory one. “But the disk is an SSD,” was an actual rebuttal I got. Never mind the fact that this was Aurora, so the “disk” is a slice of (multiple) SSDs exposed over a SAN…

Agree. I've heard people say things like "it is slow because it is not C++". When, in reality, the problem was I/O and N^2 algos.
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