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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

#511
post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can get the same effect by uninstalling Office on Windows. In that you don't have a bloated start time anymore, but also can't use Office.

Windows update reinstalls office even if you never installed it or opened it or own it. It’s reinstalled through most updates and on reboot.

Office? I've never seen that.

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

#512
post #462

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…

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.

Do you know how it compares to Dolphin for interacting with very large (100k+ files) directories? Dolphin is the only file manager I’ve found that keeps up with the large directories- GNOME (Nautilus) and Windows Explorer are dogshit slow, even after the file list populates. macOS Finder is somewhere in the middle but still very slow.

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

#513

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.

Ah the ole slash screen. I remember in high school days writing programs in VB and of course it had to have some "Cool" splash screen.

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

#514
post #340

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

What I am glad to leave behind and forget like a nightmare is Windows local networking with shared folders etc - these never worked nice and the last time anybody I know used these was pre-2010. Today we just use NextCloud, Matrix, email and Git for all our collaboration needs.

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

#515
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

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.documen…

Best workaround (still ridiculous that it hasn't been fixed) is to set a PDF printer as your default printer.

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

#516
post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hope this doesn't come off as disrespectful, as in that I don't believe you, but out of personal interest, would you consider expanding on that? I'd love to hear about the particular example you were thinking of, or in what ways self-taught coders surprised you over academically-taught ones, if you've had experience working with both over a meaningful span of time. Also, if the case, in what ways self-taught coders were/are maybe lacking on average.

If you've ever given answers to that in another comments on HN or elsewhere, feel free to link.

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

#517
post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've given on on macos' mail app too, mailspring isn't perfect but I had mail crash and lose my emails and I couldn't have that happen again. never been an issue with mailspring

Wouldn’t the server always have your mail?

Not in the old days of the POP3 protocol, as opposed to today's IMAP.

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

#518
post #231
post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Office 2003 still works absolutely fine It works fine if the user is ok with the features from 2003. E.g. Excel 2003 is limited to smaller spreadsheets of 65536 rows by 256 columns but Excel 2007+ can handle larger worksheets of 1048576 rows by 16384 cols. I also recently used Excel's new LAMBDA() function which was introduced 2020. In earlier versions, it required writing a VBA UDF to accomplish the same task of as…

You're right about Excel; however, I think big data files should be handled in a db rather than in a spreadsheet. And sqlite can query Excel files (with an extension), and it's super fast and you can use any function you want, or write your own.

> I think big data files should be handled in a db rather than in a spreadsheet.

Your side lost completely. Pop a signal flare or build a bonfire, maybe someone can rescue you from the island you've been living on since the war ended.

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

#519

Microsoft have even managed to make Windows Explorer (a lot) worse in Windows 11. Auto-complete in the address bar completely unresponsive. Taking ten seconds to show the contents of a local folder. Interacting with network shares a complete usability mess. Looks a bit nicer though, and there's tabs. Goodness knows who they've got maintaining Windows.

Microsoft Corporation publish Windows File Manager via the Microsoft Store.

https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9p7vbbbc49rb

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

#520
post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The alternatives are honestly not as good.
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