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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

#721

Post by zahlman »

osigurdson wrote: post #470
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…

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.

I've been trying to impress upon people from my own research in Python packaging: Pip is slow because it defaults to pre-compiling bytecode (and doesn't invoke multiprocessing for that, although this seems to be in the works from the discussion I've seen); imports literally hundreds of modules even when it ultimately does nothing; creates complex wrappers to set up for connecting to the Internet (and using SSH, of course) even if you tell it to install from a locally downloaded wheel directly; caches things in a way that simulates network sessions instead of just actually having the files... you get the idea.

"It's written in Python and not e.g. in Rust" is simply not relevant in that context.

(For that matter, when uv is asked to pre-compile, while it does some intelligent setup for multiprocessing, it still ultimately invokes the same bytecode compiler - which is part of the Python implementation itself, written in C unless you're using an alternative implementation like PyPy.)

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

#722

Post by naikrovek »

dimgl wrote: post #384

Windows is bafflingly bad. It's gotten so much worse in the last four years, but it's always been bad. I've never gotten bluetooth to work correctly on Windows. Apps randomly crash. Three different versions of settings pages, and they crash. Snipping Tool only works half the time. I had to run a debloater on my system because searching for something in the Start Menu would never give me the results I wanted. Xbox ads…

this is like a word-for-word repeat of a comment that i've seen probably 1,000 times in my career.

> never gotten bluetooth to work on windows

I seriously doubt this. seriously. if true, it is a user problem, because i've never had an issue, nor has anyone I know.

> apps randomly crash

true of any operating system, also that's not what "randomly" means. you mean "unexpectedly" I think.

> settings pages crash

never happened to me, ever. if it has, it was infrequent enough that i have no memory of it, and i've never heard this complaint before from anyone.

> snipping tool only works half the time

again, I use that thing continuously on Windows and it always works.

> xbox ads during gameplay

what game? what [everything]? I've never seen this and I play games on windows all the dang time.

it very much sounds like you've cherry picked experiences that others have had and piled them all here and declared that they happen to you. Maybe they have, I don't know, but if this has all happened to you in the last 4 years, you are the only person on the planet who has experienced this. Not even in the depths of Microsofts online communities and the Microsoft Discord do I read of a single person with all of these problems.

I don't know what your problems are underneath, but they're not Microsoft. If they were, I would have those problems, and I don't. Some of these were common 10 years ago when Windows 10 came out, but only for a month or two. Certainly not in the past 4 years. not unless you're intentionally avoiding upgrades or something.

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

#723

Post by int_19h »

wltr wrote: post #696
int_19h wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Au contraire, I would say that Mint is probably the closest to stock Win11/macOS experience right now. Gnome, on the other hand, looks utterly alien and non-discoverable

What you mean by Win 11/macOS? I see them as completely different from each other. Or are there some overlaps? Personally, I like modern Gnome: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43859753

They have been converging for some time now. The taskbar in Win11 is very much a macOS Dock wannabe, for example.

Personally, I find modern Gnome insufferable because it is non-customizable to the extent that even macOS only dreams of, and it doubles down on the modern trend of hiding important UI behind poorly discoverable gestures (active corners etc). Except their take on it is even worse in general for mouse users because of how much more "legwork" it adds - e.g. in a default Gnome setup on Fedora, you need to move mouse cursor in the top left corner for the dock to show up (so that you can switch apps or launch a new one)... but then it shows on the bottom of the screen, so now you need to move the cursor all the way there across the screen.

But that's all subjective and not really my point. The point, rather, is that Gnome looks and behaves very different from Win11 and macOS both, in ways that don't make it easy for users to migrate (and in fact they specifically state that their UX design does not consider that a goal).

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

#724

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

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…

For Word, go back to Draft (formerly Normal) mode. That makes pagination asynchronous and reduces clutter not needed while editing.

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

#725

Post by layer8 »

bluedino wrote: post #645
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.

A lifetime ago when I was doing MSP work, our law office clients were using the DOS versions of WordPerfect because the Windows version was too slow. They refused to store files in directories and use good file names (although they were limited to 8.3), so they just scrolled through all their files until they found the right one. But they could open them so fast they didn't care. In windows you had to use the mouse,…

I agree with the point about the immediacy of TUIs, but I use MS Office (and Windows in general) almost exclusively by keyboard, so the point about having to use a mouse isn’t completely accurate.

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

#726

Post by wk_end »

layer8 wrote: post #715
MisterTea wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 did we get back to this though? By piling up nonzero-cost abstractions left and right.

And it's easy to understand how we get into that trap. Each one of those abstractions is very low-cost, so it seems harmless.

And getting out of the trap is hard too, because no single abstraction is to blame - you can't just hit things with your profiler and find the hot spot. It's all of them. So now you either live with it or rewrite an entire stack of abstractions.

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

#727

Post by Workaccount2 »

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.

I'll take the hate for this, but I have been using gemini to build narrow scope apps and they are extremely fucking fast compared to their bloated software package suite $200/user/month counterparts. It's amazing how fast and efficient programs can be when not trying to cover every use case for every possible user at every possible moment on top of a sea of tech debt programming.

While true LLMs fall flat on their face when fed massive codebases, the fact of the matter is that I don't need a 200k LOC program to accomplish a single task that an LLM can do in 2k LOC.

To give an example, we have proprietary piece of software that is used to make (physical) product test systems using flow charts and menus. It's expansive and complex. But we don't need it when we can just spend 30 minutes prompting your way to working test code and it produces way faster and more robust systems.

Maybe the devs of that software package cannot dump that whole codebase into an LLM and work on it. But they are completely missing the forest for the trees.

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

#728

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

spapas82 wrote: post #202
bambax wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Office 2003 still works absolutely fine and is free if you bought a licence some time in the past. It doesn't have the stupid ribbon or any other annoying new feature. I recently wrote a macro so that Word could call an AI API to do AI-assisted translation, works like a charm.

Main problem with office 2003 is that it can't reliably open docx and friends making it more or less non compatible with anything newer. Being able to open only docs you create yourself isn't very useful in a collaborative environment. The main advantage of office 2003 of course is that it's the last office without activation and other crap: you pass the serial and own it for life, it won't bother you again. I wantwd…

There is an addon for 2003 that enables OOXML support. Look for FileFormatConverters.exe.

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

#729

Post by layer8 »

Illotus wrote: post #638
SoftTalker wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The Ribbon is more difficult to visually grep for me than the classic menus. Not to mention that a number of functions are still hidden in mini-menus in the Ribbon.

It wouldn’t be so bad if keyboard navigation was as good as with the classic menus, but having to press the Alt key separately, and general increased latency, kills it.

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

#730

Post by reaperducer »

hedora wrote: post #651
Illotus wrote: post #636

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This might match your recollection. x86 Win95 raytracing in javascript on my arm laptop is usable, but sort of slow: https://copy.sh/v86/?profile=windows95 Once it boots, run povray, then click run. It took over 2 minutes to render biscuit.pov, though it did manage to use SSE!

It took over 2 minutes to render biscuit.pov

We used to wait two hours for a mandelbrot to display on a Commodore 64, and were delighted when it did.

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