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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

#61
Office is large and may not load instantly. If you use it all day anyway, preloading and not closing it makes sense. The same way I preload Emacs and Firefox.

Of course if you do not use Office all day, and are OK to wait until it loafs on demand, the preloading should be turned off.

(And, frankly, if you don't use Office, why do you need Windows anyway? To play games that don't run on a Steamdeck?)

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

#62
post #5

I'm more surprised that this is news than anything else. If you had asked me a minute ago, I could have sworn it's already a well known fact that they do this. They've been doing it since Windows 95 and explorer. At least.

It changed with O365 a few years ago. Basically office is a big virtual app these days.

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

#63
post #6

Why on startup? Windows startup is already so painfully slow, especially compared to Apple silicon machines, and adding Office to it would only compound this problem. I think this problem can be avoided, while also still helping pre-load Office, if Windows just detects when resource utilization is low and loads Office in the background then.

> When Startup Boost is active, the scheduled task will not run immediately at login to avoid slowing down your PC — it will wait 10 minutes to ensure the system is in a steady idle state. Additionally, Startup Boost will be disabled when Energy Saver mode is active. Startup Boost only runs if you have launched Word recently, and if you have not launched Word recently it will automatically disable itself. If you meet…

That makes me wonder how many corporate office drones start an Office app within 10 minutes of logging in, because this feature would be useless for them.

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

#64
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.

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

#67
Reminds me of something. I ran a software development agent for a while. We were working on a job-seeker / employer match-making application; when a job-seeker submitted their resume the system would take a few seconds to run a geo search, process data, look for related employers and hit 3rd-party endpoints.

The client was initially put off by the 2 second loader, so we designed a "fun fact" loader that had a random blurb about the industry the job seeker was searching on. The client liked that so much he actually suggested we slow down the job seeker search so the end user could see it for a bit longer.

We talked him out of it in the end but occasionally suggest throttling our servers as a feature of our current company. MSFT should look into this

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

#68

Hmm, wonder if this could trigger another antitrust lawsuit?

How? Any other office suite or program could do the same thing.

You made me go back and read TFA, I don't think that's the case.

Where did you saw that?

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

#69

Ah, the oldest trick in the book. Luckily, I'm sure that no on else will think to try this trick, and Windows will continue to load quickly.

My understanding is that Chrome has been doing this for years. ChatGPT agrees and links to https://ihaveapc.com/2024/10/understanding-chromes-continue-...

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

#70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you measured with a stop watch I'm sure it would take more than 2 seconds but to be accurate it is perceptibly brief whereas others startup is perceptibly to them slow. Why? When fast startup is enabled shutting down does a reboot and then a hibernate so that it can wake up from hibernate when you start up but with the same effect as a fresh start. This is generally much faster than a full startup. This should and…

Oh, I didn't even know fastboot was a thing. That's pretty clever. Does it still need to be disabled if you're dualbooting and not interacting with the windows partition? And yeah, I have a desktop computer. I bet hardware failure rates are much higher in laptops. All good points.

The answer is a definite maybe because some hardware will keep state when hibernated and will be unusable if this isn't disabled. For instance the WiFi won't work in the other OS. Also sooner or later you are going to need a file you received on windows or indeed on any fs mounted on windows.

Best just disable the feature.

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