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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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.)
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
+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.
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.
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.
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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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth's_law
Moore gives. Billiam takes.
Its horrendous, my work windows laptop the amount of crap just loading at startup is getting stupid.
“Nah man you just need a little more AI bullshit crammed into all your apps.” -Microsoft, probably
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.
Yeah, straight back 15-20 years ☕😋
The invention of ssds was not to speed up computers, but to allow us to have more unwanted stuff autostart.
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.
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.
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.
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)…
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.
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.
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.
Including all the analytics gathering windows has to run on startup. What a pain.
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.
They also make Edge launch at startup, it also never really closes when you “close” it.
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).
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.
that bit you can turn off in edge settings… but the webview engine stays because of widgets and probably some other bullshit.
my work windows pc used to fill almost the entire 8gb ram with just the crap that autostarted.
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.
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.
Companies running 10-20 year old hardware and the amount of spyware that exists nowadays gets in the way
Tons of legacy code that has to run at startup.
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”
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.
Dynamic libraries are also time hogs
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…
Ctrl-shift-esc opens task manager directly.
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.
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.
So what does this version of office actually do that my account copy of office 2003 doesn’t, besides bog things down?
Didn’t they start doing that decades ago? Did they stop at some point?
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.
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?
They’ll move office straight into the window kernel.
I’m having flashbacks to Word 6 for Mac, when everyone downgraded back to Word 5.1.
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?
i’m just surprised HOW they are able to make text editor apps so heavy and slow. seriously, HOW??
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.
So their AI can’t fix this issue?
Needs more vibe.
Remember the other day when Microsoft boasted that 40% of their code is written by AI?
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…
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.
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
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.)
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
+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.
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.
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.