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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

#501

Post by jeltz »

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…

But is it actually faster by any significant amount on your workload? Did you benchmark? Temporary tables in databases rarely actually do disk IO in any blocking code path but mostly just dirty buffers in the OS or in the database itself and then something writes it to disk in the background. This limits throughput but does not add much extra latency in the common cases.

Edit: It still might be a bad idea to waste the IO if you do not have to but the latency of a temporary table is usually RAM latency, not disk latency even for temporary tables on disk.

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

#502

Post by wkat4242 »

jeroenhd wrote: post #261
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.

I think people overestimate 2000s desktop functionality. macOS's mail application is still the good old crap app that it was since its inception. Outlook Express, Windows Live Mail, and the Windows 8/8.1/10 mail apps are all terrible in their own ways. Thunderbird looks like a skinned version of a late 2000s mail client and works exactly like it. Search is quirky and unpractical, but in completely different ways Outl…

> and plain bad behavior of the programs you know and love, because the slowness of computers at the time hid it all.

Can't really blame the devs though because very often they only had single threads and definitely single cores to work with.

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

#503

Post by gymbeaux »

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…

Back in those days it took 15 minutes for Windows to “finish” booting. You’d hit the desktop but the HDD was still going ham loading a dozen programs, each with their own splash screen to remind you of their existence.

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

#504

Post by wkat4242 »

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…

> Plus many years of server-side experience says to me "I should probably just use FreeBSD" in that space.

Not a bad idea. This is exactly what I do on my daily driver.

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

#505

Post by gymbeaux »

barrkel wrote: post #328
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…

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.

Man you can still get by with Photoshop CS3 as far as features go.

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

#506

Post by bloak »

ii41 wrote: post #469
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?

It turns out that there are lots of different water tortures (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_torture) but the "Chinese" one was first documented in Italy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_water_torture

However, I don't recommend reading those articles beyond the first paragraph and list of contents!

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

#507

Post by wkat4242 »

bobmcnamara wrote: post #373
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?

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.

Compile sure, but they really had some bad ideas in those days. Remember MDI Multiple Document Interface? Having Windows within windows. It was a terrible idea.

OLE? Sure, let every application talk to the DLL components of every other application! What could go wrong? Data wants to be free right? Spread the love.

Making the desktop into a live webpage? And of course let any webpage happily load whatever binaries it wants from the internet. Super handy stuff. For some people more handy than others (really how this did not cause a mega Wannacry-event back in the day I don't understand)

There is a reason this stuff is legacy. The only reason it still compiles is because some companies have spent millions on custom developments 20 years ago that nobody remembers how it still works. Not because you should still be using it :)

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

#508

Post by alias_neo »

vendiddy wrote: post #426

As a lay person, apps like Office feel like they stay the same between updates and somehow manage to get fatter and slower. (I'm sure they've got some new improvements tucked away but I don't notice them.) Or every time I update my OS it's like a 10GB download. What did I just get for that 10GB? I honestly can't tell. Even my smartphone. Seem often where I'm asked to install a 2GB update aaand it's same as before but…

A lot of the time, it's underlying libraries and tools that are updated to fix bugs, security vulnerabilities or just because they got a new version. In the case of binaries (the thing you download as an end user; compiled code), even the smallest 1 character change in the source code, can mean you have to download the entire binary again, whether it's a 5kB binary, or a 1GB one. There are patching techniques that can work around this but they're rarely used at a binary level and usually at a "package" or "archive" level.

For performance, it's a harder one to answer, because there are potentially many reasons, I have my opinions as a Software Engineer myself, but others will have different opinions. Ultimately, software moves "forward", which can mean more code, more features, more bug fixes (and thus safety checks etc) and potentially worse performance, although _better_ performance is also possible with optimisations.

That said, as hardware advances, it enables writing more powerful software with more features, which then become more of a struggle for older hardware to run.

From a device manufacturer perspective; they want to sell you new devices, so there's little incentive for them (in my opinion) in spending developer time on trying to optimise new code for older devices.

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

#509

Post by steebo »

jeroenhd wrote: post #240
krembo wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's so shitty and slow because it's a bloatware. Lucky for MS they are kind of a monopoly in the corporate world.

Office is like Jira: taken on its own, it sucks, but there are no real alternatives to it.

There are alternatives. Loads of them. But using them requires thinking about what office software you use, which is too much for the vast majority.

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

#510

Post by rollcat »

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.

Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh.

This is even more sad with Apple. My M1 Mac felt incredibly snappy with Big Sur, but is getting ever so slightly slower with each update. My iPhone SE2 is a complete disaster.

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