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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

#631

Post by skywhopper »

MisterTea wrote: post #555
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.

> from the days when spinning rust was the limiting factor How did we get back to this though? We have gigabytes/sec with NVMe and stupid fast CPU's with at least 4 cores in even low end models. Yet a text editor takes so long to load we need to load it up on boot... Such a frustrating field to work in.

How much engineering time do you think is spent optimizing startup time on most modern editors? I’m guessing next to nothing.

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

#632

Post by xattt »

LtWorf wrote: post #380
xattt wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’ve gone to some extent to avoid them.

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

#633

Post by joelwilliamson »

trealira wrote: post #622
afavour wrote: post #617

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know this is such a stereotypical "get off my lawn" statement but we've lost the art of software engineering. It's all about stuffing as many features in as quickly as we can and pushing it out to as many people as possible. Performance is always secondary. Not that I'm that nostalgic for the old days, we would have been doing the exact same thing if we were able to get away with it. But performance restrictions me…

Niklaus Wirth wrote about this in 1995, in his essay A Plea for Lean Software. About 25 years ago, an interactive text editor could be designed with as little as 8,000 bytes of storage. (Modern program editors request 100 times that much). An operating system had to manage with 8,000 bytes, and a compiler had to fit into 32 Kbytes, whereas their modern descendants require megabytes. Has all this inflated software bec…

“What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away”

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

#634

Post by smithkl42 »

I made the observation back in the 90's that Word will always take several seconds to load. Any longer and it becomes too painful, so Microsoft will figure out a way to fix it. Any shorter and it just means that there are more bloated features that Microsoft can stuff into it.

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

#636

Post by Illotus »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #490
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 wish companies would go back to building fast apps It seems fascinating how much more efficient Windows apps were back in the nineties, capable do to almost everything the same today apps do in a similar manner on orders of magnitude less powerful hardware, often performing even faster. The last time I expressed this, probably also here, somebody suggested the performance drop is the cost of modern security - vul…

My recollection is completely different, software was really slow on contemporary PCs in the 90s. Spinning disks, single core cpus, lot more swapping due to memory being so much more expensive.

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

#637

Post by Zambyte »

troad wrote: post #411
MSFT_Edging wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

KDE is great. It gets slept on because of its bad rap circa 2004, but it has low-key become the best DE by far. Sane defaults, nothing tries to fight you, everything is configurable. If you don't have the time or inclination to tinker with things like tiling WMs - and more power to you if you do, but I don't - KDE is the best there is.

Tiling WMs have more up front cost, but they don't require continuous tinkering if you don't want to tinker. I have been using the same SwayWM config for like 5 years now.

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

#638

Post by Illotus »

SoftTalker wrote: post #548
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.

Yeah that era of Office, pre-ribbon, was pretty nice as Office goes.

Ribbon was better for most people who didn't have all the shortcuts in muscle memory. It is much more discoverable.

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

#639

Post by spitfire »

toast0 wrote: post #594
qwerty456127 wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wish companies would go back to building fast apps It seems fascinating how much more efficient Windows apps were back in the nineties, capable do to almost everything the same today apps do in a similar manner on orders of magnitude less powerful hardware, often performing even faster. The last time I expressed this, probably also here, somebody suggested the performance drop is the cost of modern security - vul…

I mean, as mentioned upthread, Office 97 (and Office 95 before it) was slow to load, so slow that they added the start up accelerator. You can run Office 97 now and it'll start fast because disk i/o and cpus are so much faster now. Otoh Excel 97 has a maximum of 256 columns and 64k rows. You might want to try Excel 2007 for 16k columns and 1M rows, and/or Excel 2016 for 64-bit memory.

The 90s was a time when computers were doubling in speed every 18 months. I remember office 97* being lightning fast on. A 366mhz celeron - a cheap chip in 1998.

You could build fast software today by simply adopting a reference platform, say. A 10 year old 4core system. then measuring performance there. If it lags then do whatever work needs to be done to speed it up.

Personally I think we should all adopt the raspberry pi zero as a reference platform.

Edit: * office 2000 was fast too with 32 megs of ram. Seriously what have we done?

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

#640

Post by hedora »

jonhohle wrote: post #582
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 always think the same thing. 486s could run real-time spell check and do wisiwig layouts and came on floppy disks. Now we have screen recording apps that require 256MB downloads every 5 minutes (yesterday’s story). I have a small utility app that I sell and make great pains to keep it small and resource light. I really appreciate when other devs do the same.

486's were way past when that became practical. I remember using Prodigy on a 286. Screenshots are rare, since you can't fire it up in an emulator unless you have a modem that can make phone calls to the 1980's. Also, machines from back then didn't really have room to store screenshots:

https://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/1063

Their service used vector art to render interactive pages like that over <= 2400 baud modems. Other than it being proprietary and stuff, I'm guessing the web would be a much cooler place if HTML hadn't eaten their lunch. SVG is a decent consolation prize, I guess.

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