Image: Chris Hoffman / IDG
You know how every annoying Windows program wants to launch as soon as you boot up your computer? Well, now Office is going to do that, too. A new “Startup Boost” function will set Office to load when Windows starts up, which will make apps like Word and Excel launch faster—while making the rest of your computer slower. Whoopie.
I’m being flippant, but it’s understandable that Microsoft would want to give Office a performance boost, even if it is somewhat illusory. And in the company’s defense, the announcement in the Microsoft 365 Message Center Archive (spotted by The Verge) does say that the new tool will only be enabled on PCs that have at least 8GB of RAM and 5GB of free disk space. I think even trying to run Windows 11 on just 8GB of RAM is kind of optimistic these days, but at least there’s a floor.
A cynic might wonder why Microsoft is m
23 Comments
cebert
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.
gibibit
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
ghurtado
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.
rappatic
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.
marcodiego
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.
dankwizard
It's a great idea and the reason Microsoft are the biggest in the game. Kudos to them, I tip my hat! Here here!
sherdil2022
Nothing new and closing Office applications don’t necessarily terminate some of the Office processes – notoriously Outlook.
naikrovek
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
CuriousRose
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.
_--__--__
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.
moralestapia
Hmm, wonder if this could trigger another antitrust lawsuit?
1970-01-01
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.
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…
bitwize
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.
vjvjvjvjghv
[flagged]
gerdesj
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
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.
everdrive
Ah, the oldest trick in the book. Luckily, I'm sure that no on else will think to try this trick, and Windows will continue to load quickly.
mrandish
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.
CyberDildonics
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.
nine_k
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
Microsoft Build 2.0 is going to be a massive joke.
jackconsidine
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
al_borland
I have a habit of uninstalling any programs that take it upon themselves to start up on boot without me specifically requesting it. Any company with that little respect for the user isn’t one I want to be involved with.