Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup (www.pcworld.com)
from fattyfoods@feddit.nl to technology@lemmy.ml on 02 May 15:21
https://feddit.nl/post/33357526

#technology

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cyborganism@lemmy.ca on 02 May 15:42 next collapse

Install Linux. Use OpenOffice. Problem solved.

blinfabian@feddit.nl on 02 May 15:45 next collapse

LibeOffice, OnlyOffice, all great apps

adarza@lemmy.ca on 02 May 16:08 next collapse

libreoffice. which has also had a similar feature for years.

pupbiru@aussie.zone on 03 May 02:26 collapse

afaik onlyoffice has financial connections to russia, fyi

baduhai@sopuli.xyz on 02 May 16:12 next collapse

Don’t use OpenOffice, it’s nearly unmaintained, use LibreOffice

Cenzorrll@lemmy.world on 02 May 17:08 next collapse

Libreoffice, OpenOffice was abandoned when oracle bought it

cyborganism@lemmy.ca on 02 May 23:26 collapse

You’re right. Sorry, my age is showing showing. LOL

JeremyHuntQW12@lemmy.world on 03 May 03:55 collapse

Why are people using word processors at all ? They’re only used to print letters on paper.

i_am_not_a_robot@discuss.tchncs.de on 02 May 15:51 next collapse

Didn’t they start doing that decades ago? Did they stop at some point?

adarza@lemmy.ca on 02 May 16:25 collapse

it’s been a long time but i vaguely remember an office tray icon or desktop toolbar or something that could run all the time.

nowadays, windows caching and prefetch should be more than enough… and that’s not even considering the fast ssd we have now, either.

riskable@programming.dev on 02 May 15:51 next collapse

They will do this but then what option will they have left when they make it even more bloated and slow—since they now have this “extra room”, as it were?

muzzle@lemm.ee on 02 May 18:26 collapse

They’ll move office straight into the window kernel.

curbstickle@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 02 May 16:13 next collapse

Its horrendous, my work windows laptop the amount of crap just loading at startup is getting stupid.

CaptDust@sh.itjust.works on 02 May 16:23 next collapse

Most of my coworkers never turn their machine off, but I appreciate windows taking it’s time. Warming up the work laptop in the morning is like a ceremony at this point. Solid 10-15 minutes to grab coffee, have a chat, check the feeds… Lol I wonder how much time/productivity is collectively wasted across the country from this crap.

adarza@lemmy.ca on 02 May 16:31 next collapse

when i set up a new pc i warn the users moving from really old ones that their coffee-fetching and bagel toasting time is about to shrink to zero.

curbstickle@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 02 May 16:32 next collapse

Oh definitely. Its shut down every day, has a dedicated dock in the home office, and I open it at 9am.

Thats when I get my coffee and snack. Its just surprising how much longer I can sit and sip before starting now.

Valmond@lemmy.world on 02 May 16:34 next collapse

Yeah, straight back 15-20 years ☕😋

purplemonkeymad@programming.dev on 02 May 16:50 next collapse

The invention of ssds was not to speed up computers, but to allow us to have more unwanted stuff autostart.

adarza@lemmy.ca on 02 May 21:10 next collapse

and to install ‘mandatory’ giant bloated updates faster…

and to reboot faster after crashes (which may or may not have been caused by the above updates)…

floofloof@lemmy.ca on 03 May 02:49 collapse

The same with the incredibly powerful CPUs and huge amounts of RAM we all have now. These are little supercomputers, and everything in Windows takes longer than it did 25 years ago on machines with a tiny fraction of the power.

deafboy@lemmy.world on 03 May 13:09 collapse

This trend is not limited to windows. Try to open a notepad or a calculator on any modern linux distro. 3-5 seconds. And it’s getting worse with snaps and flatpacks.

floofloof@lemmy.ca on 03 May 15:17 collapse

It’s true, but the effect is still much less pronounced on Linux than Windows. Opening a web browser, for instance, is usually a lot faster in Linux than opening the same browser in Windows.

Part of the problem is everyone building on common libraries that themselves build on libraries, leading to layer after layer of abstraction with a little loss of efficiency at each one. Since most software is cross-platform, this affects multiple operating systems. And needing to build for multiple platforms is itself one of the drivers of all this abstraction.

Cenzorrll@lemmy.world on 02 May 18:02 collapse

I remember my morning routine around 2007-2008 in college before Linux was usable enough for me was turn on laptop, make coffee and have breakfast. Once the clickety clack stopped, check email or something. If it was still clacking away, get ready to head to university and it would have to wait. While I had XP on that thing it did not leave the house unless I was planning to hit the library to write a paper or something that would take more than an hour. It was not worth it to go through the startup procedure between classes. I needed the charger wherever I took it because 20% was lost to either starting up or traveling while on.

ininewcrow@lemmy.ca on 02 May 16:42 next collapse

Every time you want a break just relax and if the boss shows up just restart your computer. Tell them you’re waiting for the system to boot after it froze or installed an update.

YurkshireLad@lemmy.ca on 02 May 17:11 collapse

Including all the analytics gathering windows has to run on startup. What a pain.

k_rol@lemmy.ca on 02 May 16:34 next collapse

They also make Edge launch at startup, it also never really closes when you “close” it.

curbstickle@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 02 May 16:37 next collapse

Thats because of office I believe, since its using edge underneath.

Ah, the edgewebview2 crash. So consistent, so destructive.

This is why I’m glad I mostly just use it for teams, everything else is pretty much ssh from my main workstation (debian).

IrritableOcelot@beehaw.org on 02 May 16:57 collapse

Wait is the stupid lag in Word because it’s running on Electron now??? That explains so much.

Edit: after a little bit of searching, it looks like it just loads webview2 to avoid having to load it if you open any of the add-in search panels. So the lagginess of new word is just inexcusable.

adarza@lemmy.ca on 02 May 21:12 collapse

that bit you can turn off in edge settings… but the webview engine stays because of widgets and probably some other bullshit.

umbrella@lemmy.ml on 02 May 17:09 next collapse

my work windows pc used to fill almost the entire 8gb ram with just the crap that autostarted.

curbstickle@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 02 May 17:39 collapse

Ive got 16gb in the work-provided machine… And I can safely say that more than half is just autostart crap.

Since I only use it for messaging/email, I don’t much care tbh. Just kind of a fun to note for the laughs though.

ramenshaman@lemmy.world on 02 May 18:25 collapse

“Nah man you just need a little more AI bullshit crammed into all your apps.” -Microsoft, probably

Eheran@lemmy.world on 02 May 16:21 next collapse

All of this while Excel is still stuck in 1997 in terms of functionality.

locuester@lemmy.zip on 02 May 17:52 collapse

So are bicycles. They do a thing and they do it well.

Eheran@lemmy.world on 02 May 19:24 collapse

Nonsense, Excel is extremely bad at analyzing and visualizing data. The whole point of Excel is ease of use, cell reference, etc. Now make 10 graphs with different ranges, different axis ranges, etc. good luck. It is a whole lot of useless clicking, with open tabs like axis ranges of course always resetting to the line formatting. It is exactly like it was 20 years ago with zero improvement. You can still NOT simply input a cell with a value into the axis range to make it automatic.

scytale@lemm.ee on 02 May 16:52 next collapse

Microsoft:

<img alt="" src="https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/facebook/000/022/138/highresrollsafe.jpg">

jordanlund@lemmy.world on 02 May 17:12 next collapse

CTRL-ALT-DELETE - Task Manager - Click the little fuel gauge on the left hand side to access and disable startup items.

Copilot? Disabled.
Microsoft 365 Copilot? Disabled.
Teams? Disabled.
Microsoft To Do? Disabled.
OneDrive? Disabled.
Phone Link? Disabled.
Xbox? Disabled.

Just add one more to the list…

Creat@discuss.tchncs.de on 02 May 17:30 collapse

Ctrl-shift-esc opens task manager directly.

letsgo@lemm.ee on 03 May 07:35 collapse

True, but whenever Windows is having a mini-meltdown the NMI from the three finger salute is often enough to jar it out of its fixation. Plus my computer has learnt that if I hit Ctrl-Alt-Del 30 times the next time is the big red switch.

Creat@discuss.tchncs.de on 03 May 09:28 collapse

The direct shortcut for opening task manager actually also had special handling for problematic situations. This includes low memory and high CPU.

I’ve had situations where the direct shortcut worked, but ctrl-alt-delete didn’t. Never had the opposite.

umbrella@lemmy.ml on 02 May 17:13 next collapse

i’m just surprised HOW they are able to make text editor apps so heavy and slow. seriously, HOW??

black0ut@pawb.social on 02 May 18:27 collapse

There used to be a bug in ms word (idk if it’s still there, it’s been years since I last used any ms office app) where, if you had a separate printing server connected to a printer, and the printer was off but the server was online, it would try to fetch printer features, resulting in an unanswered request that would end up timing out. For some reason, word would completely freeze until the request timed out at 30s. No input worked, screen didn’t refresh, window controls didn’t work either. Completely frozen. And the worst part was that word would try to fetch printer features every time you clicked completely unrelated buttons. Want to export to PDF? Frozen for 30s. Want to save your document with a different name? First wait for 30s. Oh, you want to change the page size? You guessed it, 30s frozen.

cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de on 02 May 18:06 next collapse

They shouldn’t have made it so bloated then. The 2003 version opened fairly quickly, even on a late 90’s computer.

ch00f@lemmy.world on 02 May 18:32 collapse

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth's_law

InternetCitizen2@lemmy.world on 02 May 22:01 collapse

Moore gives. Billiam takes.

Zerush@lemmy.ml on 02 May 18:28 next collapse

Only if you have installed MS Office, it was one of the first thing which I deleted, among with other MS Bloatware and services “to improve the user experience”. A clean Windows is a difference like day and night with the defauly one, in speed, stability and RAM usage. The specs of my modded Windows11 24H2 (Acer laptop)

<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/1a76320e-ec5f-47eb-92b3-6b2a19c55b76.png">

Vendetta9076@sh.itjust.works on 02 May 20:26 next collapse

How’d you go about this? Currently forced to use windows.

hinterlufer@lemmy.world on 02 May 20:42 collapse

Not sure what you want to show with that screenshot. It tells you that 700 MB of your installed RAM is reserved for your integrated GPU which doesn’t really have to do anything with Windows.

fluckx@lemmy.world on 02 May 18:58 next collapse

shrugs in linux

Articles like this and the fact they’re still trying to get recall back was reason enough for me to switch again.

DieserTypMatthias@lemmy.ml on 02 May 19:09 next collapse

The fuck? LibreOffice/any office suite in a browser is better than this.

JoMiran@lemmy.ml on 02 May 19:21 next collapse

Obligatory <img alt="" src="https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/6bd9e729-b5f4-46c0-b25d-0a0da429b062.jpeg">

qaz@lemmy.world on 02 May 19:34 next collapse

I’m forced to use Windows due to work and damn is it slow. File explorer feels so sluggish compared to Dolphin

Scrollone@feddit.it on 02 May 20:57 next collapse

Agree, especially switching between tabs is sooooooo slow

jabeez@lemmy.today on 02 May 22:08 next collapse

Yep, it’s quickly becoming absolute garbage, I hate it more every day. Getting home back on Linux feels so much better.

floofloof@lemmy.ca on 03 May 02:47 next collapse

Deleting files and folders in Windows is the one that gets me. It’s so incredibly slow, and if you try to cancel it manages to take even longer “Cancelling…”.

sneaky@r.nf on 03 May 12:46 collapse

Obligatory Windows is trash and f those guys. Something about Dolphin turns me off tho. Thinking about exploring new file explorers.

I can’t seem to find a view I like in Dolphin. Everything I try I still end up with these two columns when I’d rather have one compact list.

chemicalwonka@discuss.tchncs.de on 02 May 21:27 next collapse

Of course it’s slow, it’s full of telemetry, spyware and built-in AI junk, it couldn’t be any different

Xanza@lemm.ee on 02 May 22:13 next collapse

OfficeClickToRun.exe is years and years old. This isn’t a new thing at all.

adarza@lemmy.ca on 02 May 22:23 collapse

that’s the c2r maintenance process. main job is to set up and update the local files for office.

Xanza@lemm.ee on 02 May 22:32 collapse

It’s a maintenance process which preloads essential office files into memory for usage when you launch the different Microsoft applications so their startup time is reduced as well.

7rokhym@lemmy.ca on 02 May 22:21 next collapse

Windows already takes far to long to load. I turn on my Linux PC and by time I stand up to get a coffee it’s ready to go, then I remember it’s Saturday and I won’t be using Windows 11 all blessed day!

ABetterTomorrow@lemm.ee on 02 May 22:29 next collapse

Microsoft products are just too big. At this point you need a lite/pro/full version. (No Microsoft, this is a fucking subscription idea) (always buy to own folks)

vane@lemmy.world on 02 May 23:39 next collapse

And this is how adding code to Word 97 for 28 years without refactoring works.

floofloof@lemmy.ca on 03 May 00:46 collapse

Interestingly they did the same with Word 97: loaded Office at startup so the individual Office applications would seem to launch faster.

Waraugh@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 02 May 23:41 next collapse

My only windows machine is my work laptop with windows 11 docked to three monitors. The other three are mint, endeavor, and qubes hosting several systems. I prefer Linux but the performance of the work laptop has never been an issue even if I don’t like it. I can reboot, connect to the vpn, have word relaunched to a recovered copy, and be back in a teams meeting with outlook open and Jira up in 5 minutes or less. I have to do it once or twice a month because something stupid stops working while I’m in a meeting. These 15 minute reboots, make coffee between, and other similar commentary comes across as wishcasting. There’s plenty of reasons windows sucks. My company has all kinds of stupid agents installed on it that negatively impacts performance also. McAfee was the worst, I’m glad they got rid of that but that wasn’t a windows problem either.

thatradomguy@lemmy.world on 03 May 05:00 next collapse

Coming soon to your neck of the woods… Copilot OS! Now with no Windows, only Copilot and a shitty embedded MS Edge. Everything you know as Windows is hidden behind an enforced Microsoft account which you cannot bypass or opt-out! Oh—and don’t forget—you now need a PC with 64GB DDR6789 RAM, RBG+ chipset with tiny peener cache, 2 BRAIN TRACING GPUs, SUPER SECURE BOOT, TrustClock, Lie Detector, Bio-metric reader created by NSA, and their secret time bomb tracker that will secretly ghost all your data at a moments notice and require you to purchase the subscription to ALL STAR MEGA SUPER SONIC ULTRA CLOUD DATA WAREHOUSE. Oh, but hey, at least it’s software upgradable…

AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world on 03 May 13:39 collapse

Windows is actually streamed from the MS Cloud™. Only Copilot and the Word loader run locally.

nossaquesapao@lemmy.eco.br on 03 May 17:48 collapse

What? You live in a lower income country and doesn’t have a reliable internet connection and a high spec machine? Our board of directors have a personal message for you:

spoiler

___ “Fuck you!”

altphoto@lemmy.today on 03 May 06:38 next collapse

Don’t use Windows? Use Linux instead.

Just a thought.

PanArab@lemm.ee on 03 May 09:32 next collapse

Microsoft shouldn’t have killed Wordpad. Imagine if they updated it instead with docx compatibility.

potemkinhr@lemmy.ml on 03 May 20:06 collapse

See people wouldn’t need to install Word if the builtin wordpad opened Word documents. They can upsell it to you and use your data

Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 03 May 10:31 next collapse

I vaguely remember that they were already preloading the Office DLLs way back in Windows 95 or XP days.

edonkey@feddit.nl on 03 May 13:28 collapse

Yeah I remember something similar, office quickstart I vaguely remember it being called

Hupf@feddit.org on 04 May 07:18 collapse

Of course it came with a toolbar back then

[deleted] on 03 May 11:33 next collapse

.

GoodEye8@lemm.ee on 03 May 15:34 next collapse

But will it fuck up my formatting when I add an image?

pinball_wizard@lemmy.zip on 03 May 16:32 collapse

But will it fuck up my formatting when I add an image?

Ctrl+Shift+F+U+F

cnlwhs@lemmy.blahaj.zone on 03 May 16:45 collapse

C-x M-c f i

flux@lemmy.ml on 03 May 20:17 next collapse

What do you use for spreadsheets on Emacs? At least org-modes tables are there but aren’t quite it…

Abnorc@lemm.ee on 03 May 20:29 collapse

Emacs is a text editor that can also do other things. It’s an alternative to something like VScode or notepad++, not an office suite. It’s super archaic too, so it will always have a niche crowd.

pineapple@lemmy.ml on 03 May 12:11 next collapse

But now windows takes longer to boot and is too slow because ms office is always running in the background. +1 for reasons to use linux.

Lettuceeatlettuce@lemmy.ml on 03 May 19:29 collapse

I’m constantly shocked how poorly Windows 11 runs on brand new high end hardware.

My current company uses brand new $1,500 HP enterprise grade laptops and they frequently freeze up, stutter, and get really hot from basic office work.

My old Debian servers I used to have there were running butter smooth with KDE Plasma on 12 year old hardware.

eestileib@lemmy.blahaj.zone on 03 May 21:47 collapse

All those screenshots don’t get processed for free.

pineapple@lemmy.ml on 04 May 07:36 collapse

Yeah ofc Lol.

blarth@thelemmy.club on 03 May 13:38 next collapse

Libre does this as well.

mukt@lemmy.ml on 03 May 13:41 collapse

Libre gives you an option to do this, or not, at the time of installation.

blarth@thelemmy.club on 03 May 13:44 collapse

Correct, but the default for many years was to just do it.

mukt@lemmy.ml on 03 May 15:20 next collapse

I have been using LO since many years and don’t have any recollection of not being asked at the installation.

Care to share some details of your experience/knowledge in the matter?

vithigar@lemmy.ca on 03 May 19:37 collapse

It’s a checkbox in the installer, easy to miss. Has defaulted to off for a very long time now, basically ever since SSDs have been commonplace.

vithigar@lemmy.ca on 03 May 19:35 collapse

The default depends on your storage. It has defaulted to not load on startup for me any time I’ve installed it to an SSD.

User79185@discuss.tchncs.de on 03 May 13:43 next collapse

It is so weird, I remember Office 97 loading very fast on Intel Pentium 3. Now suddenly it needs preloading on startup with 4-6 core PCs…

nossaquesapao@lemmy.eco.br on 03 May 17:45 next collapse

It would be awesome if we could map the increase in hardware demands on popular software by each new feature, design changes, and other minor changes added over time.

polle@feddit.org on 04 May 07:34 collapse

Recently installed office 2000 via bottles/wine on linux. The installation was so quick that i thought it crashed.

dandelion@lemmy.blahaj.zone on 03 May 15:25 next collapse

I switched to LibreOffice more than a decade ago and I never missed Microsoft Office 🤷‍♀️

(EDIT: I don’t mean this dogmatically, there are plenty of times I have had to compromise and go back to proprietary software, but LibreOffice really has successfully replaced Microsoft Office for me - it’s just as feature-rich and reliable with a similar UI. Google Sheets has a few features that I like and which aren’t in LibreOffice or MS Office, but I only use that for work when I need a collaborative sheet.)

nossaquesapao@lemmy.eco.br on 03 May 17:37 collapse

Another libreoffice user here. Published a couple of academic works edited entirely on it, and no one complained about formatting errors. Things have improved a lot in the last years. We also have onlyoffice as another great alternative

Lettuceeatlettuce@lemmy.ml on 03 May 19:24 collapse

+1 I used LibreOffice all through university, wrote dozens of papers, did class presentations, résumés, etc. Never had a problem. I use it at work too and collaborate with O365 users often.

Such an awesome piece of software. I used OnlyOffice as well, really nice if you don’t need the fancier features that LibreOffice has.

potemkinhr@lemmy.ml on 03 May 20:03 collapse

Wait isn’t OnlyOffice more feature wise closer to MS office, and with a more similar layout? Used it shortly but realized I like the “older” non ribbon UI of LO, but I’m still relearning the old office layout.

Lettuceeatlettuce@lemmy.ml on 03 May 20:53 collapse

It’s designed to be more compatible with MS’ .docx formats, less weird formatting issues when converting between them. But the actual features it has is less than LibreOffice.

Two different focuses, LibreOffice is designed with more powerful features and uses the .odf file format by default.

OnlyOffice is lighter weight and designed with MS Office compatibility first and foremost, although both suites support both file formats and in my experience, both work great with either file types and for basic users, have all the features you would need.

CeeBee_Eh@lemmy.world on 03 May 17:56 next collapse

Remember the other day when Microsoft boasted that 40% of their code is written by AI?

SnotBubble@lemmy.ml on 03 May 18:55 next collapse

So their AI can’t fix this issue? <img alt="" src="https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/03ab313d-754a-45f4-8464-34eda017c51b.jpeg">

Opisek@lemmy.world on 04 May 21:04 collapse

Needs more vibe.

drathvedro@lemm.ee on 03 May 19:52 next collapse

I remember when I was tasked with fixing up a personal/work PC of my colleague who was our lead artist. I was a bit shocked to see WinXP there, when win10 was already the norm, and with quite a bunch of severely outdated software on it. At the time, I thought “well, at least it does the job well enough for him to be still employed”. Now I understand that he was probably onto something…

altphoto@lemmy.today on 03 May 20:28 next collapse

Looks like you got unsaved changes…

Save as…Untitled.docx…Very Complex Naming Convention that my company came up with.docx save!

OK what’s the name of the file? Here’s a random location could you rename the file once more and tell us where to save it in one drive?

reddig33@lemmy.world on 03 May 20:32 next collapse

I’m having flashbacks to Word 6 for Mac, when everyone downgraded back to Word 5.1.

HugeNerd@lemmy.ca on 03 May 21:17 next collapse

We have 64 bit multi-core CPUs unconstrained by clock speeds, RAM, bus bottlenecks, instructions sets, addressing modes, registers, or storage speeds. Monitors are beyond visual resolution, graphics are pumped out at a rate of zillions and gazillions of 32 bit pixels per second. How can any software be anything less than instantaneous these days? How can this modern bloated AI-dreamt high-level sludge code be as slow as my Commodore 64 booting GEOS from a 5.25" floppy?

The mouse button shouldn’t even have time to bounce up from my finger releasing it and the screen should already be loaded.

Michal@programming.dev on 03 May 21:30 next collapse

Tons of legacy code that has to run at startup.

eestileib@lemmy.blahaj.zone on 03 May 21:45 next collapse

Dynamic libraries are also time hogs

Couldbealeotard@lemmy.world on 03 May 23:34 collapse

And better hardware means there is no longer a requirement to optimise.

What was “if we don’t make this code more efficient, it won’t run on modern computers”, turned into “we don’t need to make this code efficient because modern computers will be able to run it”

VindictiveJudge@lemmy.world on 04 May 07:51 collapse

You see this with video games, too, where PC games are better optimized when they’re multiplatform releases that also are on one or more consoles near the end of their sales life, just because they had to make it run smoothly on hardware that was comparatively out of date.

ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca on 03 May 21:50 collapse

Companies running 10-20 year old hardware and the amount of spyware that exists nowadays gets in the way

ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca on 03 May 21:47 next collapse

I actually think this is a good solution

weew@lemmy.ca on 04 May 19:04 next collapse

So what does this version of office actually do that my ancient copy of office 2003 doesn’t, besides bog things down?

phoenixz@lemmy.ca on 04 May 22:43 collapse

Again: switch to Linux already, use Libre Office or if you have to, google docs. Heck, install onlyoffice if you want it self hosted online, anything but Microsoft