Pages, Keynote, Numbers on Mac load in seconds. Thanks I’m good.
Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup
831–840 of 1001 posts
Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup
#832Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is really missing for Linux desktop nowadays? Still drivers? And I guess office software and gui configurability.
Mostly games and photoshop. Libre Office is more than sufficient for most people. > gui configurability A bit confused by that. Linux desktop environments tend to be more configurable, and you can configure most things end users want to configure in a GUI with the major DEs. Do you mean the sysadmins cannot configure as much in a GUI? I think that probably is a major barrier as it means a lot of retraining. Also, whe…
> Linux desktop environments tend to be more configurable, and you can configure most things end users want to configure in a GUI with the major DEs.
I was mostly thinking about the times I end up needing to tweak something through the terminal. I wouldn't expect most desktop users to want to do this. But maybe you're right that the most important stuff is covered by guis nowadays. There seem to be a lack of guardrails for low to semi-technical users though. I wonder if something like Nix could help with guardrails and being able to backtrack.
Something like nix-gui seems like an interesting approach: https://github.com/nix-gui/nix-gui
Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup
#833Earlier 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.
My guess is that we're already seeing the consequences of "AI-assisted programming". Just yesterday, Microsoft's CEO revealed that 30% of their code is written by AI.
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Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup
#834Earlier quoted context omitted.
My understanding is that Chrome has been doing this for years. ChatGPT agrees and links to https://ihaveapc.com/2024/10/understanding-chromes-continue-...
That Chrome feature has nothing to do with loading Chrome quickly. On my Mac, I can't find any kind of launch item or background process. Chrome doesn't launch anything until I launch Chrome.
Safari does it in Mac, not sure about Chrome.
Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup
#835Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Right, but you could just hit up/down to scroll through the files in the directory listing. Very simple
Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup
#836Earlier quoted context omitted.
As I’m professionally working on a niche search engine, let me offer this: it’s a notoriously hard problem that seems simple at first, but requires catering to a bazillion different edge cases; every optimisation you do makes another case worse. Having said all that: I also hate how shitty search almost everywhere is. It’s hard, but not that hard.
I’d be happy if it catered to exactly one edge case: ”Show me all emails that contain this word”
…which is the problem I was referring to: by optimising for that—your—use case, those of other people will invariably suffer.
We only have a single text field as the input; how are we supposed to guess whether you want to find an exact match of the phrase, a fuzzy match, at least one of the words provided, or any other possible variation? Also, are you interested in the content, the subject, the recipient, the sender address you used, a header field, an attachment, what have you? Do you want them ranked by the frequency of the word, or the position from the start of the text? Does it count those occurrences in quoted passages of previous mails downthread multiple times? What if it’s a stop word?
There are of course sensible ranking solutions and heuristics for these questions. I just want to highlight it’s not as trivial as it first sounds. Most mail clients probably don’t ship with a Lucene index—while they should.
Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup
#837What'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 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 remember a laptop in the early 1990's that had Microsoft Office in ROM to load faster. I can't find a reference to it right now.
Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup
#838Imagine explaining this to someome in 1995: "In thirty years our computers will have sixteen threads of execution at 4.5 GHz each, with 4 IPC or better, along with 16 gigabytes of memory that can move data at 50 gigabytes a second. Practically everyone will have solid state storage that loads and saves at more than a gigabyte per second. Many computers will have GPUs capable of beating the fastest supercomputers in t…
Fast forward ten years from NOW:
* Windows itself takes 10 minutes to boot because it's preloading a hundred Office libraries/extensions like Mac OS 7.
* Microsoft Office apps have returned to being incredibly slow to open—because they decided that the added speed of preloading just gave them more leeway to add bloat.
* Microsoft has acquired several AI startups that use different models and provide several high-RAM, GPU-hogging apps. To work around the slowness they have worked with hardware vendors to include multiple GPUs on each actual GPU card. They don't communicate directly with each other though... That feature is only enabled for the "Enterprise" series of GPUs that cost $50,000 each.
* Microsoft Office now automatically use AI prediction for everything. Including the data (not just the formulas) in your Excel spreadsheets. But it gets it wrong so often that people wish they could turn that feature off. They can't, though, because they didn't pay for the "Enterprise" version of Windows or Office (have to have both in order to truly disable the AI).
* AI is now actively watching all inbound and outbound traffic on every PC, increasing base latency a hundredfold. Microsoft claims this allows them to catch viruses, scammers, and bad state actors faster.
Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup
#839Windows 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 ha…
I love these kinds of comments. It reminds me of the Reddit threads of people complaining about bugs on Cyberpunk 2077's release, only for people to reply with "I played the game, I didn't run into any bugs! What bugs are you talking about?" Meanwhile a quick Google/YouTube search reveals entire montages devoted purely to bugs.
Here are Windows Forum threads talking about each of the problems I've mentioned, with thousands of people saying "I have the same question":
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/unable...
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/window...
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/window...
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/snippi...
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/xbox/forum/all/unwanted-...
Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup
#840Windows 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…
> I had to run a debloater on my system Hot take: your ""debloater"" screwed up your system. I've had problems with Windows, but none of the ones you've described. > For the average user this experience sucks. But for me, I'm okay. I guess this describes my Windows experience. I _know_ some people have problems. I don't, because I guess either I got used to it or I know how to avoid it.
This is a great comment. I may wipe my Windows machine a 10th time and try again, but I'm sticking with Linux for now.