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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

#861

Post by codr7 »

7657364574 wrote: post #763
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.

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.

By software, most of it is probably generated scaffolding.

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

#862

Post by sota_pop »

riskable wrote: post #732
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:

FYI - that is the publicly announced date that MSFT will be officially dropping support for Win10.

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

#863

Post by codr7 »

MarcelOlsz wrote: post #570
freeAgent wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The alternatives are honestly not as good.

Linear.app and it's not even close.

Definitely has everything I need and then some, a breath of fresh air compared to Jira.

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

#864

Post by const_cast »

y-c-o-m-b wrote: post #718
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…

> 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 a…

Windows doesn't have "issues", per se. As in the system is pretty stable and it works, presumably, like it's designed.

The problem is the design is just bad. Lots of things are just sucky and they're meant to be that way. Search is ass, explorer is half-decent only in Windows 11. There's way more than 3 settings panels, and yes, they all look different. You still have to edit the registry for some random tweaks. Apps put there files god knows where. Every app updates independently. You still have to go online and download random .exe and .msi files to install things. If you get errors the message is typically worthless. The system tray is a fucking mess. IIS sucks. powershell is okay but cmd is still around and yes, sometimes you have to use it. And, cherry on top, everything is slowwwww. Especially the file system. You don't really notice it until you have a version controlled code base but NTFS has to be, like, 1000x slower than competing Linux filesystems.

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

#865

Post by naikrovek »

dimgl wrote: post #839
naikrovek wrote: post #722

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tho…

This is likely because people take their customizations (like custom setup scripts to “decrapify” windows) that used to work great on previous versions of windows and apply them unchanged to new versions or something, because “windows is the same underneath, this is just a reskin that they charge you $150 for.” Every time I have helped someone with problems like these (when I did see them a lot earlier in my career) it was because they did something goofy to cause it. Like using a PCIe to PCI adapter with a PCI to ISA adapter, so they could plug in a flipping Sound Blaster64 or something. “I’m not buying a new sound card!! I’m not using the onboard sound!! I bought this sound blaster in 1996 and I want to use it!! Microsoft should let me!!”

Others would show me how the computer would act weird after unplugging PCI cards while the computer was running, and blame Microsoft. “See!? SEE?!” Every single WTF moment I had in desktop support with issues like this was user error.

Maybe yours aren’t. Maybe the Microsoft Answers forum is filled with exceptionally smart people who all know exactly how to use a computer, never ask stupid questions, and never give wrong answers, but I think we both know that isn’t really true.

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

#866

Post by const_cast »

efdee wrote: post #814
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…

> 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.

Windows kind of has this property where it rots. Both in time between reboots and in time in general. Running Windows 1+ week without a reboot and it just... gets a little more buggy and a little more slow each day. And then after a few years, it's time for a reinstall.

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

#867

Post by codr7 »

wkat4242 wrote: post #604
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…

Yeah it's because Mac Mail downloads every single email and indexes it locally. Outlook (especially the new one) is just electron-based webmail. So every search happens in the cloud and it doesn't have a full copy of all your emails. This would not be a problem for searching of course, if the cloud-based search worked properly. But yeah... About that. :X The "classic" outlook should do it better but it also doesn't i…

AI in search is just evil, something either exists or it doesn't, maybe on a Tuesday isn't good enough.

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

#868

Post by cogman10 »

ezst wrote: post #853
cogman10 wrote: post #736

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Call me an idiot, but I still gladly take Swing and javafx over JS and monstrosities like react. The state of Qt is also very good. Web won because the distribution model is easier on the user, and because managers thought UX designers would be making whole apps now, saving on rates. Not because it's technically superior.

You're not an idiot for liking the Swing/javafx/QT way of doing things. Or even for thinking they are technically superior.

The bigger issue isn't the tech, it's the ecosystem. While you might like swing, you simply are never going to find the swing version of Material UI or D3.js. That's more the problem that you'll run into.

For some of our apps because we need charting, we are using GraalJS just to run the JS charting library to export to an image that we ultimately put on some of our downloadable reports. It's a huge pain but really the only way to do that.

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

#869

Post by lukan »

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 did we get back to this though?"

Probably because windows needs to make a connection for every file somewhere else first and wait for the reply, before granting you the advanced software as a service feature called text editing.

It definitely feels like this at times and I fear there is too much truth in my statement.

But it is not just windows only. My old chromebook took seconds to open a folder in the file browser (even if it was already open). But a "ls" on the terminal was instant for any folder. So getting the information was not the problem. But from there to displaying it in a GUI, there seems to be myriads of important (tracking?) layers involved.

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

#870

Post by arkensaw »

I have an old copy of office 2003 I still use, it's lightning quick on even ten year old hardware. It literally starts in under 1 second.

It needs a plugin to open and save docx but it works well.

I don't know if there's some fantastic functionality I'm missing out on but it works fine for me.

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