Re: How To Speed Startup Of Microsoft Office? Have It Running All The Time!

On Fri, 3/28/2025 2:58 PM, Frank Slootweg wrote:

Peter Johnson <peter@parksidewood.nospam> wrote:

On Thu, 27 Mar 2025 21:30:43 -0000 (UTC), Lawrence D'Oliveiro
<ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
>

Microsoft is trying to reduce the time it takes to start Office on
Windows, by moving part of the work to the time when you boot your PC
<https://www.theverge.com/news/637469/microsoft-office-speed-boost-faster-launch>.
>
What a wonderful idea: make an app start faster by making your machine
take longer to boot. What if other major Windows apps did the same
thing? Wouldn?t it be cool to have all these apps lurking in the
background, already running, chewing up memory and CPU cycles?

>
Look under the Startup Apps in the task manager and you'll find a
whole load of things that run at startup. Mine includes the Dymo label
printer app, Copernic desktop search and the app that monitors the
battery backup.

 
  Exactly, nothing new. But perhaps for Lawrence's - apparently - stone
age OS, which doesn't know how to have such 'Startup Boost' (and
similar) programs without "chewing up memory and CPU cycles", when
they're "lurking in the background, already running" [1]. That problem
was already solved at least some four decades ago.
 
[1] Of course his OS *can* do that. After all, it's Unix-like, isn't it?
 

A number of the SVCHOST, don't typically use cycles. You can check
that with Process Explorer. If elevated as Administrator, it can
do profiling of processes, and it shows a cycle count for the
item you're tracing. And many SVCHOST are zero. The ones like
Windows Update support, would not be zero.

Quiet processes still use memory. A suspended Metro App could still
take up memory. Once it is in the run state, the event loop will be
running, and any time the OS sends an event, the event loop "eats it"
and that takes a few cycles at a minimum.

The OS has a Memory Compressor (it can only be seen in Process Explorer,
not in Task Manager). If under extreme memory pressure,
the MS Office Metro.App could have its actual (occupied) memory
compressed to half the size.

The OS does have a few tricks, to conserve resources.

But also at times, is a pig. Nobody is perfect :-)
There is still lots of room for improvements.

Windows and Linux and FreeBSD and MacOS are all "preemptive multitasking"
OSes. Just as Unix was. That makes a world of difference to runtime
reliability. No longer do we put up with two crashes per day. Even the
RAM electrical signal integrity today, is finally "good" and not
"utter crap" like the old days.

   Paul