Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup
Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup
www.pcworld.com
Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup
109 comments
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Its horrendous, my work windows laptop the amount of crap just loading at startup is getting stupid.
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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.
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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.
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Yeah, straight back 15-20 years ☕😋
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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.
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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.
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Including all the analytics gathering windows has to run on startup. What a pain.
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"Nah man you just need a little more AI bullshit crammed into all your apps." -Microsoft, probably
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They also make Edge launch at startup, it also never really closes when you "close" it.
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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).
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that bit you can turn off in edge settings.. but the webview engine stays because of widgets and probably some other bullshit.
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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.
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And this is how adding code to Word 97 for 28 years without refactoring works.
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Interestingly they did the same with Word 97: loaded Office at startup so the individual Office applications would seem to launch faster.
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Install Linux. Use OpenOffice. Problem solved.
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Don't use OpenOffice, it's nearly unmaintained, use LibreOffice
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LibeOffice, OnlyOffice, all great apps
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libreoffice. which has also had a similar feature for years.
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afaik onlyoffice has financial connections to russia, fyi
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Libreoffice, OpenOffice was abandoned when oracle bought it
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You're right. Sorry, my age is showing showing. LOL
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Why are people using word processors at all ? They're only used to print letters on paper.
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I'm forced to use Windows due to work and damn is it slow. File explorer feels so sluggish compared to Dolphin
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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...".
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Yep, it's quickly becoming absolute garbage, I hate it more every day. Getting home back on Linux feels so much better.
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Agree, especially switching between tabs is sooooooo slow
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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.
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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.
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Companies running 10-20 year old hardware and the amount of spyware that exists nowadays gets in the way
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Tons of legacy code that has to run at startup.
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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"
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Dynamic libraries are also time hogs
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Of course it's slow, it's full of telemetry, spyware and built-in AI junk, it couldn't be any different
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Obligatory
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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.
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They shouldn't have made it so bloated then. The 2003 version opened fairly quickly, even on a late 90's computer.
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Moore gives. Billiam takes.
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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.
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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.
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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....
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Windows is actually streamed from the MS Cloud™. Only Copilot and the Word loader run locally.
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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 spoiler
"Fuck you!" :::
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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.)
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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
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+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.
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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?
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They'll move office straight into the window kernel.
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Remember the other day when Microsoft boasted that 40% of their code is written by AI?
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Don't use Windows? Use Linux instead.
Just a thought.
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So their AI can't fix this issue?
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Needs more vibe.
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All of this while Excel is still stuck in 1997 in terms of functionality.
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So are bicycles. They do a thing and they do it well.
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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.
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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!
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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...
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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.
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Recently installed office 2000 via bottles/wine on linux. The installation was so quick that i thought it crashed.
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Didn't they start doing that decades ago? Did they stop at some point?
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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.
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OfficeClickToRun.exeis years and years old. This isn't a new thing at all.-
that's the c2r maintenance process. main job is to set up and update the local files for office.
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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.
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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...
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I vaguely remember that they were already preloading the Office DLLs way back in Windows 95 or XP days.
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Yeah I remember something similar, office quickstart I vaguely remember it being called
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Of course it came with a toolbar back then
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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.
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The fuck? LibreOffice/any office suite in a browser is better than this.
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Microsoft shouldn't have killed Wordpad. Imagine if they updated it instead with docx compatibility.
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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
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I’m having flashbacks to Word 6 for Mac, when everyone downgraded back to Word 5.1.
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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?
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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...
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Microsoft:
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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)
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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.
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How'd you go about this? Currently forced to use windows.
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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
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So what does this version of office actually do that my ancient copy of office 2003 doesn't, besides bog things down?
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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.
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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)
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I actually think this is a good solution
109 comments