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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

#731

Post by layer8 »

d_tr wrote: post #587
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 thought Windows had a generic subsystem for "warming up" frequently used apps for faster launches.

Only for OS components, I think?

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

#732

Post by riskable »

scioto wrote: post #716

My $0.02 with 708 comments ahead of me. I currently use Windows, 10 to be exact, to play games, and in a VM to run an income tax fat app (since the online version is so much more expensive). My game machine cannot upgrade to 11. A mobo upgrade won't be that expensive for the game machine, but instead I'll covert it to a Linux box and run the few games that work on Linux. I believe my Windows days are over as of, say,…

I love that you've got something like, "upgrade to Linux" in your calendar :)

However, I recommend at least testing it on your hardware before that date. Put Ventoy on a USB drive and play with some live distros. Just to make sure everything works the way you expect.

You never know, you may have that one piece of hardware that doesn't work :shrug:

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

#733

Post by ralphc »

naikrovek wrote: post #690
trealira wrote: post #622

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

software authors that don't care about performance annoy me (and I am an old man.) The amount of things a computer can do in a single thread are amazing, and computers now have a dozen or more threads to do work. If developers cared about performance, things would easily be 20x as performant as they are today. I'm not talking about "write in assembly, duh" I'm talking about just doing things intelligently instead of…

What's your proposal for a "compromise" language between programmer productivity and performance, especially for multiple threads and CPUs? Go, Rust, a BEAM language?

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

#734

Post by colonial »

naikrovek wrote: post #690
trealira wrote: post #622

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

software authors that don't care about performance annoy me (and I am an old man.) The amount of things a computer can do in a single thread are amazing, and computers now have a dozen or more threads to do work. If developers cared about performance, things would easily be 20x as performant as they are today. I'm not talking about "write in assembly, duh" I'm talking about just doing things intelligently instead of…

> presumably copilot will help introduce better code into applications than a daydreaming developer would

Copilot is trained on Github (and probably other Git forges w/o permission, because OpenAI and Microsoft are run by greedy sociopaths.)

I'd wager that the majority of fleshed out repositories on these sites contain projects written at the "too-high level" you describe. This certainly seems to be true based on how these models perform ("good" results for web development and scripting, awful results for C/++/Rust/assembly...) - so I wouldn't get your hopes up, unfortunately.

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

#735

Post by wkat4242 »

Vilian wrote: post #694
ubermonkey wrote: post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are a small software company. We use Office 365 and their hosted Exchange for email. I manage my mail in the native Mac Mail tool; my boss uses Outlook. For commercial exchanges (ie, dialog about sales with customers), we're almost always both on copy. SEVERAL TIMES A MONTH he asks me to find a mail for him, because Outlook search is letting him down, often on bone simple searches (e.g., for something like a speci…

At that point i would switch to thunderbird or something

It's really a PITA to use standard protocols on M365 now though. They try to make it as difficult as possible. And you need lots of exceptions from your admins. Everything is "legacy", the Microsoft word for Not Invented Here and they make it sound like something super dangerous.

Of course that third party clients don't give them any telemetry, "insights", cross-marketing opportunities like copilot, has nothing to do with it.

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

#736

Post by cogman10 »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #700
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.

We stopped developing for users/customers and instead added layers to make developer lives easier. Why the hell are all my desktop apps written in JS now?!

> Why the hell are all my desktop apps written in JS now?!

Have you seen the state of pretty much every non-js UX framework?

That's why.

JS/css/html won the UX domain in a way that no other language comes close to. If you look at the most recent most modern UX frameworks, they are often just half implemented poor mimics of the js/css/html stack with approximately 0 devs writing new 3rd party extensions.

Intellij uses swing, SWING, as it's UX. A framework written in the 90s filled with warts. Yet, it's still a better experience than the more recent JavaFX experience. Swing simply has more support.

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

#737

Post by TheAmazingRace »

resource_waste wrote: post #291
rafaelmn wrote: post #187

At this point I view Windows as a legacy/compatibility OS, all the news about Windows is how they are making it worse for everyone. And using it now and then it feels like that too. Windows 10 Mail app had integration with system calendar, you would get itsycal built into the OS. Windows 11 removed that and made the OS Mail app spam infested shit, and they expect me to pay a subscription for something that comes bund…

>At this point I view Windows as a legacy/compatibility OS I literally thought about that yesterday as my Windows computer I was using for a legacy application froze/slowdown to the point of unusability. Not the first time this has happened. And nearly every day I have a UI issue with some programs not maximizing and staying behind old windows. I've had embarrassing moments when my OS/MS teams crashes during a meetin…

I can't agree more. Fedora is such an excellent piece of kit, and with the now edition-tier KDE variant, you have the most premium Linux desktop out there that has a fresh-enough update schedule and is rock-solid stable.

I even migrated from Arch to Fedora, just because I was getting tired of the occasional rolling update bricking my system.

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

#738

Post by zer00eyz »

afavour wrote: post #617
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.

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…

>> It's all about stuffing as many features in as quickly as we can...

The problem isn't "engineering" the problem is the culture of product management. (Note: NOT product managers per se).

I ask this basic question, how many Directors, VP's or CPO's do you know who got their job based on "cutting out unused features"? If you can find one, it will end up being the exception that proves the rule. The culture of "add", "new" and "shiny" doesn't reward keeping things lean and effective. T

In the tangible world we look to accountants for this sort of thing (because they tend to have costs). Think cheap Costco hotdogs and free cookies at Double Tree. No one in product, dev and accounting is going to sit down and try to justify loosing some code, features and maybe a few customers to make it faster when you can just "engineer" you way out of it and not have to sell less is more.

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

#739

Post by kyrra »

QuicklyNow wrote: post #574
kyrra wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I made an account to thank you for this. I've been looking for a _fast_ alternative to explorer since Windows XP. But one that doesn't require a change in workflow. This is the fastest I've tried by far. I've only been using it for 5 minutes, but I'm sold. Earlybird discount too! Thank you for posting this, and if you have any other speedy apps you'd recommend I'd welcome suggestions. Mine top suggestions are Speedcr…

I'll check these out, thanks!

I learned about File Pilot (whose author posts here: https://x.com/vkrajacic) from Casey Muratori (https://x.com/cmuratori) who pushed it a bunch because he loves fast things.

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

#740

Post by vivzkestrel »

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…

stupid question: why haven't we even heard of an attempt to say rewrite office from scratch or how about even bigger like write windows from scratch for the next version and scrap all the 20 yr old+ workarounds hardcoded into it
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