Between Office's increasingly bloated size, slow booting and super annoying CoPilot icon right where I'm working (which still can't be turned off in OneNote) - I'm on the edge of dumping Office. I pretty much only use OneNote and a little OneDrive (3% of the included storage plan) to sync files between machines and I run Word and Powerpoint less than a dozen times a year combined.
Even as a paying customer, all the Office apps and services are now so aggressively pushy it's gone beyond "Rude", is now passing "Annoying" and accelerating toward "Yeah, I can't do this." I just want to ask Satya "How much more do I have to pay you to simply STFU and let me NOT use (and not even know about) services I already pay for but don't need?"
I bought three 12 month Office subs for $49 each on a black Friday blow-out three years ago. The last one will expire in January and if it doesn't get better, I'll be ending my 30 year Office relationship. I'll probably go to Libre Office and replace OneDrive cloud storage with SyncThing + my own server. I'd be fine to keep paying $50 a year for the 5% of Office I actually use - but only if I can use the exact Office I had around three years ago before it was so annoying.
bhouston · 3h ago
I switch to Google Docs/Sheets/Presentations many years ago as my primary tool and I haven't installed any type of local office in 6 years. Google Workspace has built in digital signature tools and the change tracking in Google Docs is also really good.
486sx33 · 1h ago
Google workspace is awful , it’s super dooper awful with Gemini shoved up my ass all the time , which is impossible to disable, and trains on all my data. Gsuite makes office look good !!
Ferret7446 · 38m ago
The workspace admins can disable Gemini, among many other things. Google also does not "steal" your data if you read the ToS; any training is strictly scoped to that workspace.
If you thought for a few seconds, you would realize that companies with big legal teams would not sign a contract that would give Google the right to their data.
packetlost · 2h ago
I've been pretty happy with OnlyOffice. I'm pretty sure it's based on Libre or OpenOffice but looks much more similar to 2012~ era MS Office.
Spooky23 · 3h ago
You’ll be back. LibreOffice is so visually gross it’s pretty hard to use.
mrandish · 3h ago
Oh, that's too bad. I haven't checked it out in a long time. However, in recent years the Office UX has been getting increasingly worse for me too. Not ugly, just bigger and fatter, taking up more screen space to show less info.
If open source alternatives aren't suitable, my fallback is to get whatever the last retail box versions were of the few Office apps I actually occasionally use and then never update them. There hasn't been a single new Office feature I care about added in about ten years.
noisy_boy · 3h ago
LibreOffice should have provided a theme/icon pack "Office Icons" - half the time I can't tell what an icon is for because most of us have been raised on MS Office. Also, it would do well with a "Simple" mode ala Google Docs that is sufficient most of the time for most folks.
Otherwise it works fine, haven't had any issues with the documents it produces and I particularly like the direct export to pdf feature.
gtech1 · 3h ago
Check out Only Office
marcodiego · 4h ago
That's is not a new idea. I think Office 97 had an accelerated startup that made windows take a little longer the boot but faster the start office.
coherentpony · 3h ago
It shouldn't be "an idea" at all. Profile the application, find the hotspots, understand what the performance limiter is, and fix it.
Granted, this is all Hard Work. I understand that. But it's the right thing to do.
DaiPlusPlus · 4h ago
From memory, Office 97 had that dedicated Office shortcut bar on the desktop that it inherited from Office 95, but that was more of a proto-Quick-Launch-bar than a startup accelerator. Though because the bar necessarily needed to load some Office DLLs from disk I can see how that would have given Word/Excel/etc a modest startup boost.
michaelt · 3h ago
Back in 1997, most developers would show a 'splash screen' as their application loaded, because of course it takes time for applications to load.
theandrewbailey · 3h ago
Now we have web apps that show spinners and throbbers, sometimes forever.
rappatic · 4h ago
Why on startup? Windows startup is already so painfully slow, especially compared to Apple silicon machines, and adding Office to it would only compound this problem. I think this problem can be avoided, while also still helping pre-load Office, if Windows just detects when resource utilization is low and loads Office in the background then.
zamadatix · 4h ago
> When Startup Boost is active, the scheduled task will not run immediately at login to avoid slowing down your PC — it will wait 10 minutes to ensure the system is in a steady idle state. Additionally, Startup Boost will be disabled when Energy Saver mode is active. Startup Boost only runs if you have launched Word recently, and if you have not launched Word recently it will automatically disable itself.
If you meet the hardware requirements threshold and recently have used Office then preloading it 10 minutes after login is extremely unlikely to impact your startup.
theandrewbailey · 3h ago
That makes me wonder how many corporate office drones start an Office app within 10 minutes of logging in, because this feature would be useless for them.
ghurtado · 4h ago
> Why on startup?
Because Windows is usually a lot less optional than Office, for the average user.
NoPicklez · 4h ago
I disagree, my Windows machine loads into the OS quicker from login than my Mac.
bee_rider · 3h ago
I don’t like Windows. And it is baffling to me that startup speed is a figure-of-merit nowadays given how absurdly fast drives have gotten.
With those caveats aside, I must unfortunately acknowledge that Windows startup is perfectly fine (Linux is faster, but again this competition is pointless. Unless you are some compute infrastructure supplier and need to boot a million VMs a day or whatever).
Sometimes when people post with baffling Windows performance problems, it is because their experience comes from corporate laptops with some mandatory spyware from IT.
mrandish · 2h ago
> Windows startup is perfectly fine
No... it's not fine. I don't reboot all the time for work or run a zillion VMs, I'm just a regular user. But sometimes when I'm rebooting - I need to get to necessary information quickly. Waiting 40+ seconds is an eternity when standing at an airport immigration counter pulling up a pre-filed form that they said I did not need to bring but which they're now demanding (because their machines are rebooting).
I'm glad you feel it's fine for you. Not all of us agree. I'm especially annoyed because much of the new bloat slowing my life down during startup is stupid and unnecessary shit I don't even use much (or ever) - like initializing CoPilot, Edge, and now, Office.
Note: I even upgraded my SSD to an expensive Samsung 990 Pro, reportedly one of the fastest available. It's still >40 secs - and I've already gone through and thoroughly pruned all the unnecessary services, tasks and autoruns that I can. It's a top of the line >$3000 laptop that's less than a year old.
gh02t · 13m ago
Weirdly for me I don't have much trouble with startup, but shutting down windows seems to take an impossibly long time, especially on my work laptop. Like several minutes. Probably some misbehaving program and maybe not windows' fault, but I have no idea what it's doing just sitting there at the final screen after its killed all remaining tasks for eternity.
0cf8612b2e1e · 3h ago
Probably a corporate machine vs personal desktop divide. My corporate windows laptop has so much security/keylogger/spyware crap that time to unlock is ridiculous.
milch · 1h ago
I just timed it, my personal Mac takes 10s to the login screen and then 4 seconds to the desktop after putting in my password. My work Mac takes 3+ min. All of the endpoint monitoring stuff they put on there really takes its toll.
My windows gaming PC starts up in about 30s from a cold boot (though it's not encrypted...), so I would at least put the personal Mac and the Windows machine in the same ballpark. I couldn't have told you which one is faster without timing it. The work machine laptop is clearly noticeably slower.
spicybright · 3h ago
I'm actually not sure why so many people are saying it's slow.
For me login screen pops up maybe a few seconds from the bios, then everything is fully loaded after I enter my password.
Spooky23 · 3h ago
Because.. it’s slow. My team used to do VDI engineering. We could reduce boot times by 30% with optimized and tweaked out configurations, but it was still slower than my out of the box MacBook Air.
jpalawaga · 3h ago
can you come up with any other reasons why an out of the box mac might be faster than something involving vdi engineering?
michaelmrose · 3h ago
If you measured with a stop watch I'm sure it would take more than 2 seconds but to be accurate it is perceptibly brief whereas others startup is perceptibly to them slow. Why?
When fast startup is enabled shutting down does a reboot and then a hibernate so that it can wake up from hibernate when you start up but with the same effect as a fresh start. This is generally much faster than a full startup. This should and in many cases must be disabled to dual boot another OS.
Different hardware takes longer to initialize which may delay startup. This is especially true of failing hardware which may whilst in bad shape continue to work after a fashion but take far longer to initialize.
Some hardware is MUCH slower than others.
spicybright · 3h ago
Oh, I didn't even know fastboot was a thing. That's pretty clever.
Does it still need to be disabled if you're dualbooting and not interacting with the windows partition?
And yeah, I have a desktop computer. I bet hardware failure rates are much higher in laptops. All good points.
michaelmrose · 3h ago
The answer is a definite maybe because some hardware will keep state when hibernated and will be unusable if this isn't disabled. For instance the WiFi won't work in the other OS. Also sooner or later you are going to need a file you received on windows or indeed on any fs mounted on windows.
Best just disable the feature.
mikaelsouza · 3h ago
I think the way macOS and Windows loads stuff after login is a bit different though.
Since most macOS installations use FileVault by default, the login screen looks like it loads only stuff related to the login screen and not anything from the OS. Windows on the other hand, seems to load more stuff in the spinning thingy screen that appears before the login screen.
For instance, if you disable Filevault on macOS, the OS seems to load before the login screen, and then when you input your login and password, it loads to the desktop instantly. That would be a better comparison to a Windows machine, I think.
That said, I am not sure if this is how things really works, but that's how it looks like to work for me. Sorry if I spread any misinformation here :)
EGreg · 4h ago
Windows Startup is slow, so Microsoft makes Windows start up silently in the background even when computer should be powered off.
At installation Chrome, Edge browser and Acrobat Reader all silently add multiple background tasks to Windows startup which will then run at every boot and log on. Those tasks check for updates, pre-load and ensure their usage analytics get dutifully reported.
Because I only use those apps on rare occasion, I go remove all those tasks. And each of those apps checks to see if its tasks are still there on every run or update and, if not, re-adds them. I've even tried getting clever and leaving the tasks in place but just changing the run frequency to once every month or something, but they check for that too and change it back.
Anyone know of a way to override this so I can decide if apps I don't use for weeks at a time need to be always silently running, updating and phoning home?
milch · 1h ago
Adobe is the worst offender. I just checked and I have no less than 8 Adobe processes running on my macOS machine, without any Adobe apps running, and with all of the settings to run in the background or sync stuff turned off. I even have a script to nuke all of the services they install that I run every once in a while, but they just come back after a while. It's literally malware. If Photoshop and Lightroom weren't the best at what they do I'd be gone, but sadly they are.
nashashmi · 3h ago
I think Adobe PDF reader loaded incredibly slowly and they used a preloader
_--__--__ · 4h ago
I genuinely don't know if it was a bug or intentional behavior like TFA, but on the last win10 machine I used Edge would leave several of its background browser engine processes running indefinitely after the application was closed. Seems like they're just happy to let their users make unwitting sacrifices for their convenience of their devs.
RiverCrochet · 4h ago
Chrome would do that too unless the setting "Continue running background apps when Google Chrome is closed" is turned off.
Now I never understood why the chrome.exe's would hang out when I didn't install any "background apps" - anyway I suspect a similar setting in Edge is buried in there somewhere.
hinkley · 3h ago
I have a vague recollection of that being related to embedded browsers in apps, and I think it was related to performance not child processes for unknown client apps.
cebert · 4h ago
For all the ESG virtue signaling that Microsoft does, you’d think they’d be concerned about the climate impact of this and why their applications are so inefficient.
Dwedit · 3h ago
The real impact is in Microsoft making people throw away perfectly good computers by ending Windows 10 support.
cjbgkagh · 4h ago
The point of the virtue signaling is that it’s cheaper than actual virtue while retaining much of the same benefit. Practicing virtue signaling and not virtue is pretty natural.
dylan604 · 4h ago
There's an old quote about "why would I pay to have the code written more efficiently when processors are constantly getting faster and harddrives are constantly getting bigger?" that always comes to mind about MS software. I don't know the validity of that quote to be any more accurate than the 640k memory one, but it always just had the feel of authenticity by everything you see as circumstantial evidence
Retric · 4h ago
The underlying issue is MS software is running on customer machines so it’s not part of their bottom line. They have little incentive to care as long as it’s not so slow their monopoly breaks.
nomel · 3h ago
My tinfoil hat told me that they're in cahoots with the big PC manufacturers, and use it as a part of planned obsolescence.
gosub100 · 3h ago
Additionally, I suspect there's 4 decades of legacy backward compatibility hacks that doing anything intelligent to help UX is impossible. It might break some peanut butter factory in Indiana that is paying for support.
dbg31415 · 3h ago
It feels like they’ve always taken the approach: “Why rewrite anything when we can just add more virtualization?” In the short term, that might help ensure compatibility with older versions with minimal testing. But after 40-something years, it’s clear that it’s become a mountain of technical debt—one that Microsoft has no real plans to tackle any time soon.
1970-01-01 · 4h ago
All I'm hearing is prefetch was put into new packaging and MS is calling it a new feature.
Management: Tweak prefetch and call it a new feature.
Reminds me of something. I ran a software development agent for a while. We were working on a job-seeker / employer match-making application; when a job-seeker submitted their resume the system would take a few seconds to run a geo search, process data, look for related employers and hit 3rd-party endpoints.
The client was initially put off by the 2 second loader, so we designed a "fun fact" loader that had a random blurb about the industry the job seeker was searching on. The client liked that so much he actually suggested we slow down the job seeker search so the end user could see it for a bit longer.
We talked him out of it in the end but occasionally suggest throttling our servers as a feature of our current company. MSFT should look into this
gibibit · 4h ago
I still can't believe how slow MS Word is to load a .docx document of about 150 pages of text, you can watch the page count in the status bar grow over a period of 10 seconds or more as it loads/paginates it.
On the plus side, it's nostalgic and reminds me of the old MS Word 6 on Windows 95 (or Windows 3.1?) so that's nice.l
vjvjvjvjghv · 3h ago
I often wish Word from around 2000 back. Back then the software was straightforward and did what it was supposed to do without much fuzz. And the speed on modern hardware would be crazy.
The latest Word version does all kinds of weird stuff around formatting and numbering. I often get documents with messed up heading numbers or lists and I have no idea how to fix them. Nothing works.
nine_k · 2h ago
I'd say that Office 97 was the pinnacle. I think you can still reasonably use it if you happen to have a copy.
This is of course problematic if you receive documents from other users :(
dcan · 3h ago
Try reading a 40+ page document with track changes enabled (and 100+ changes) - it pins a full CPU core for 5 seconds when you go to the next page!
TheOtherHobbes · 4h ago
It's essentially a giant XML file, so it's not going to win awards for speed or efficiency.
ghurtado · 4h ago
I'm more surprised that this is news than anything else.
If you had asked me a minute ago, I could have sworn it's already a well known fact that they do this. They've been doing it since Windows 95 and explorer. At least.
conductr · 3h ago
What exactly does this mean given I definitely sit there staring at a loading / app launch screen when opening Excel if the app isn’t already opened. If it’s opened already, opening another file is much much faster.
coliveira · 4h ago
Maybe they're only now making this public so people will believe that Office will start faster!
Spooky23 · 3h ago
It changed with O365 a few years ago. Basically office is a big virtual app these days.
gerdesj · 3h ago
MSO defaults to "load at startup". LibreOffice will if you let it (there is a small difference in propriety here).
The worst offender by far is Outlook (which isn't really MSO but looks like it is, or is it?)
Against an on prem Exchange, I get way better performance from Evolution (Linux) than Outlook (Windows).
geor9e · 3h ago
Fine with me. If 100% of my RAM isn't in use at all times for low priority speculative cache, then it's not doing what I want. So long as it frees up the RAM instantly the moment anything actually requests it.
CuriousRose · 4h ago
I've not had the greatest relationship with Apple software lately, however seeing every "great idea" that comes out of the Microsoft development team is quite possibly the only marketing Apple needs going forward.
spicybright · 3h ago
You're not wrong, I don't know anyone that likes all these new features.
I wonder if it even matters though. Corporations are always going to use it, and the cheapest laptops will always come with it.
nine_k · 3h ago
Office is large and may not load instantly. If you use it all day anyway, preloading and not closing it makes sense. The same way I preload Emacs and Firefox.
Of course if you do not use Office all day, and are OK to wait until it loafs on demand, the preloading should be turned off.
(And, frankly, if you don't use Office, why do you need Windows anyway? To play games that don't run on a Steamdeck?)
xyst · 3h ago
Microsoft Build 2.0 is going to be a massive joke.
CyberDildonics · 3h ago
Every program tries to run on windows startup and people wonder why their computer gets slower over time.
Download microsoft autoruns from their site to turn off everything that runs when windows start to do away with all the crap.
sherdil2022 · 4h ago
Nothing new and closing Office applications don’t necessarily terminate some of the Office processes - notoriously Outlook.
naikrovek · 4h ago
Fucken genius.
Fix the problem? No way, Jose; We’ll move the problem somewhere else.
I would like to know how we got to a place where any application taking more than 0.5 seconds to start is acceptable in any way.
I have text editors which have visible input lag, even to my untrained eye. How in the HELL does that even happen?
All of you hustlers out there making story cards and calculating velocity: stop doing this shit! Performance is fucking important.
“CPU is cheap” — fuck you it is. If your application takes more than 0.5 seconds to start on any computer than can run Windows 11, you are either doing something wrong, or you are relying on someone that is doing something wrong and you need to work around that thing even if it is dotnet.
Developer productivity is absolutely dwarfed by the aggregated productivity loss of your customer base. Application performance and customer productivity (think of these as “minimizing the amount of time the customer spends waiting on the computer”) are paramount. PARAMOUNT! — that means they’re one of the, if not the only, most important thing to consider when making decisions.
This world is going to shit so fecking fast
skydhash · 3h ago
I moved to Linux and use real editors. Problem solved! /jk
Jokes aside, I did buy a 2019 dell latitude laptop, and it's an old CPU, but it's still amazed me how well it's working. The iGPU is aweful for anything 3d heavy (Gnome's compositor), but still good for anything else.
I also have an MBA and it's quite fast, but all those "you should do this the Apple way" is frustrating.
After a long look at my computing activities, I do not need much other than Emacs, Librewolf, and a video player. I still use the MBA for rare usage like Balsamiq and important video calls.
ipcress_file · 3h ago
Given that Office ran on my 486 and Word and Excel did everything back then that I still need them to do today, a slow startup time on modern hardware is ridiculous.
Office should be modular with a lean core and extensions for those who need them.
spicybright · 3h ago
I wish libreoffice was better. I've tried replacing office with it and every time it has the weirdest stuff going on.
UI is clunky, importing/exporting office made docs is glitchy, and I've even run into actions that don't get pushed to the undo stack.
I know this stuff always gets slowly ironed out, and the devs are working really hard, but it's just a shame it's never been a viable alternative for so long.
bitwize · 3h ago
This is one of the things that made people hate Vista. By default it was set to preload things into RAM in the background, gobbling up memory and potentially slowing the system down, both during the preload procedure and if you happened to want to run a program that the preload procedure didn't account for.
Windows 7 was so good because it was Vista without (much of) the bullshit.
theandrewbailey · 3h ago
Windows 7 did the same thing. Windows 7 was perceived as better than Vista, in part because hardware and drivers had improved in the meantime.
moralestapia · 4h ago
Hmm, wonder if this could trigger another antitrust lawsuit?
spicybright · 3h ago
How? Any other office suite or program could do the same thing.
nomel · 3h ago
Related, long ago I replaced the windows shell with hl.exe, so my computer booted straight into Half Life rather than explorer. With my one core system, it was a noticeable improvement.
spicybright · 3h ago
Lots of people keep a windows machine around for that one game that doesn't run on linux. Might make a come back!
moralestapia · 3h ago
You made me go back and read TFA, I don't think that's the case.
Where did you saw that?
moralestapia · 18m ago
Update: nowhere, xe was just making stuff up.
Many such cases these days.
dankwizard · 4h ago
It's a great idea and the reason Microsoft are the biggest in the game. Kudos to them, I tip my hat! Here here!
Even as a paying customer, all the Office apps and services are now so aggressively pushy it's gone beyond "Rude", is now passing "Annoying" and accelerating toward "Yeah, I can't do this." I just want to ask Satya "How much more do I have to pay you to simply STFU and let me NOT use (and not even know about) services I already pay for but don't need?"
I bought three 12 month Office subs for $49 each on a black Friday blow-out three years ago. The last one will expire in January and if it doesn't get better, I'll be ending my 30 year Office relationship. I'll probably go to Libre Office and replace OneDrive cloud storage with SyncThing + my own server. I'd be fine to keep paying $50 a year for the 5% of Office I actually use - but only if I can use the exact Office I had around three years ago before it was so annoying.
If you thought for a few seconds, you would realize that companies with big legal teams would not sign a contract that would give Google the right to their data.
If open source alternatives aren't suitable, my fallback is to get whatever the last retail box versions were of the few Office apps I actually occasionally use and then never update them. There hasn't been a single new Office feature I care about added in about ten years.
Otherwise it works fine, haven't had any issues with the documents it produces and I particularly like the direct export to pdf feature.
Granted, this is all Hard Work. I understand that. But it's the right thing to do.
If you meet the hardware requirements threshold and recently have used Office then preloading it 10 minutes after login is extremely unlikely to impact your startup.
Because Windows is usually a lot less optional than Office, for the average user.
With those caveats aside, I must unfortunately acknowledge that Windows startup is perfectly fine (Linux is faster, but again this competition is pointless. Unless you are some compute infrastructure supplier and need to boot a million VMs a day or whatever).
Sometimes when people post with baffling Windows performance problems, it is because their experience comes from corporate laptops with some mandatory spyware from IT.
No... it's not fine. I don't reboot all the time for work or run a zillion VMs, I'm just a regular user. But sometimes when I'm rebooting - I need to get to necessary information quickly. Waiting 40+ seconds is an eternity when standing at an airport immigration counter pulling up a pre-filed form that they said I did not need to bring but which they're now demanding (because their machines are rebooting).
I'm glad you feel it's fine for you. Not all of us agree. I'm especially annoyed because much of the new bloat slowing my life down during startup is stupid and unnecessary shit I don't even use much (or ever) - like initializing CoPilot, Edge, and now, Office.
Note: I even upgraded my SSD to an expensive Samsung 990 Pro, reportedly one of the fastest available. It's still >40 secs - and I've already gone through and thoroughly pruned all the unnecessary services, tasks and autoruns that I can. It's a top of the line >$3000 laptop that's less than a year old.
My windows gaming PC starts up in about 30s from a cold boot (though it's not encrypted...), so I would at least put the personal Mac and the Windows machine in the same ballpark. I couldn't have told you which one is faster without timing it. The work machine laptop is clearly noticeably slower.
For me login screen pops up maybe a few seconds from the bios, then everything is fully loaded after I enter my password.
When fast startup is enabled shutting down does a reboot and then a hibernate so that it can wake up from hibernate when you start up but with the same effect as a fresh start. This is generally much faster than a full startup. This should and in many cases must be disabled to dual boot another OS.
Different hardware takes longer to initialize which may delay startup. This is especially true of failing hardware which may whilst in bad shape continue to work after a fashion but take far longer to initialize.
Some hardware is MUCH slower than others.
Does it still need to be disabled if you're dualbooting and not interacting with the windows partition?
And yeah, I have a desktop computer. I bet hardware failure rates are much higher in laptops. All good points.
Best just disable the feature.
Since most macOS installations use FileVault by default, the login screen looks like it loads only stuff related to the login screen and not anything from the OS. Windows on the other hand, seems to load more stuff in the spinning thingy screen that appears before the login screen.
For instance, if you disable Filevault on macOS, the OS seems to load before the login screen, and then when you input your login and password, it loads to the desktop instantly. That would be a better comparison to a Windows machine, I think.
That said, I am not sure if this is how things really works, but that's how it looks like to work for me. Sorry if I spread any misinformation here :)
Oh btw every joke has a grain of truth (sigh) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28712108
Because I only use those apps on rare occasion, I go remove all those tasks. And each of those apps checks to see if its tasks are still there on every run or update and, if not, re-adds them. I've even tried getting clever and leaving the tasks in place but just changing the run frequency to once every month or something, but they check for that too and change it back.
Anyone know of a way to override this so I can decide if apps I don't use for weeks at a time need to be always silently running, updating and phoning home?
https://superuser.com/questions/269385/why-does-google-chrom...
Now I never understood why the chrome.exe's would hang out when I didn't install any "background apps" - anyway I suspect a similar setting in Edge is buried in there somewhere.
Management: Tweak prefetch and call it a new feature.
Dev1: Superfetch!
Dev2: We already did that.
Dev1: Superfetch for Office!
Management: Yes.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/all-right-gentlemen
https://windowsground.com/what-is-superfetch-windows-10-shou...
The client was initially put off by the 2 second loader, so we designed a "fun fact" loader that had a random blurb about the industry the job seeker was searching on. The client liked that so much he actually suggested we slow down the job seeker search so the end user could see it for a bit longer.
We talked him out of it in the end but occasionally suggest throttling our servers as a feature of our current company. MSFT should look into this
On the plus side, it's nostalgic and reminds me of the old MS Word 6 on Windows 95 (or Windows 3.1?) so that's nice.l
The latest Word version does all kinds of weird stuff around formatting and numbering. I often get documents with messed up heading numbers or lists and I have no idea how to fix them. Nothing works.
This is of course problematic if you receive documents from other users :(
If you had asked me a minute ago, I could have sworn it's already a well known fact that they do this. They've been doing it since Windows 95 and explorer. At least.
The worst offender by far is Outlook (which isn't really MSO but looks like it is, or is it?)
Against an on prem Exchange, I get way better performance from Evolution (Linux) than Outlook (Windows).
I wonder if it even matters though. Corporations are always going to use it, and the cheapest laptops will always come with it.
Of course if you do not use Office all day, and are OK to wait until it loafs on demand, the preloading should be turned off.
(And, frankly, if you don't use Office, why do you need Windows anyway? To play games that don't run on a Steamdeck?)
Download microsoft autoruns from their site to turn off everything that runs when windows start to do away with all the crap.
Fix the problem? No way, Jose; We’ll move the problem somewhere else.
I would like to know how we got to a place where any application taking more than 0.5 seconds to start is acceptable in any way.
I have text editors which have visible input lag, even to my untrained eye. How in the HELL does that even happen?
All of you hustlers out there making story cards and calculating velocity: stop doing this shit! Performance is fucking important.
“CPU is cheap” — fuck you it is. If your application takes more than 0.5 seconds to start on any computer than can run Windows 11, you are either doing something wrong, or you are relying on someone that is doing something wrong and you need to work around that thing even if it is dotnet.
Developer productivity is absolutely dwarfed by the aggregated productivity loss of your customer base. Application performance and customer productivity (think of these as “minimizing the amount of time the customer spends waiting on the computer”) are paramount. PARAMOUNT! — that means they’re one of the, if not the only, most important thing to consider when making decisions.
This world is going to shit so fecking fast
Jokes aside, I did buy a 2019 dell latitude laptop, and it's an old CPU, but it's still amazed me how well it's working. The iGPU is aweful for anything 3d heavy (Gnome's compositor), but still good for anything else.
I also have an MBA and it's quite fast, but all those "you should do this the Apple way" is frustrating.
After a long look at my computing activities, I do not need much other than Emacs, Librewolf, and a video player. I still use the MBA for rare usage like Balsamiq and important video calls.
Office should be modular with a lean core and extensions for those who need them.
UI is clunky, importing/exporting office made docs is glitchy, and I've even run into actions that don't get pushed to the undo stack.
I know this stuff always gets slowly ironed out, and the devs are working really hard, but it's just a shame it's never been a viable alternative for so long.
Windows 7 was so good because it was Vista without (much of) the bullshit.
Where did you saw that?
Many such cases these days.