Back in the late ’90s and early 2000s, if you installed a comprehensive office suite on Windows, such as Microsoft’s own Office or something like WordPerfect Office or IBM Lotus SmartSuite, it would often come with a little icon in the system tray or a floating toolbar to ensure the applications were preloaded upon logging into Windows. The idea was that this preloading would ensure that the applications would start faster.
It’s 2025, and Microsoft is bring it back. In a message in the Microsoft 365 Message Center Archive, which is a real thing I didn’t make up, the company announced a new Startup Boost task that will preload Office applications on Windows to reduce loading times for the individual Office applications.
We are introducing a new Startup Boost task from the Microsoft Office installer to optimize performance and load-time of experiences within Office applications. After the system performs the task, the app remains in a paused state until the app launches and the sequence resumes, or the system removes the app from memory to reclaim resources. The system can perform this task for an app after a device reboot and periodically as system conditions allow.
↫ MC1041470 – New Startup Boost task from Microsoft Office installer for Office applications
This new task will automatically be added to the Task Scheduler, but only on PCs with 8GB of RAM or more and at least 5GB of available disk space. The task will run 10 minutes after logging into Windows, will be disabled if the Energy Saves feature is enabled, and will be removed if you haven’t used Office in a while. The initial rollout of this task will take place in May, and will cover Word only for now. The task can be disabled manually through Task Scheduler or in Word’s settings.
Since this is Microsoft, every time Office is updated, the task will be re-enabled, which means that users who disable the feature will have to disable it again after each update. This particular behaviour can be disabled using Group Policy. Yes, the sound you’re hearing are all the “AI” text generators whirring into motion as they barf SEO spam onto the web about how to disable this feature to speed up your computer.
I’m honestly rather curious who this is for. I have never found the current crop of Office applications to start up particularly slowly, but perhaps corporate PCs are so full of corpo-junkware they become slow again?
Let’s all take a moment and appreciate the plight of these poor, tortured AIs forced to do this horrible task by us, humans.
Yes, corporate IT has the magical ability to make a Windows machine with four cores and 8-16GB RAM run like a 486.
This.. I had a corporate laptop, and the exact same model of laptop running the same OS version for personal use.
Having the two side by side there was a huge difference, the personal one would boot faster, generate less heat/noise, start applications faster etc.
> I’m honestly rather curious who this is for. I have never found the current crop of Office applications to start up particularly slowly
There’s still quite a bit of space between “not particularly slowly” and *instant*. However much one is fine with some load times and however much it makes no difference in utility of the software, instant opening of one’s application will feel far superior.
Back when I was still at big corp, my last non-ssd laptop, a thinkpad t430, took 23 minutes to be able to boot to a functional state. A rebellion got us ssds and reduced boot time to 3 minutes. Packet managers, programs to block usb sticks, extra antivirus, extra firewall, proprietary mfa tool, remote assistant tool, etc.. together with the idiotic policy that everyone from reception to ceo had to have the same machine.
MSFTs offerings improved a lot, so at our startup we get by only with the builtin tools.
Corpo IT is pain.
Shiunbird,
Those boot numbers, if true, are way higher than in my experience. I find booting to be plenty fast. Then again maybe I’ve disabled more features and have less corporate crapware installed. My major gripe is windows updates. Sometimes I need to boot into windows for a meeting…. then it wants to force updates with no option to abort and updates are so damn slow. What the hell is it doing? Wasting my time and causing me to miss meetings. Ugh this is the kind of stuff that makes me hate microsoft.
It was truly insane. Our policy forced a quick scan per boot. If this happens while all else is loading, you get 20+ minutes on spinning disks…
Did Office 4.3/95/97 really have a preloading feature? I remember a clever icon bar called “MOM” or Microsoft Office Manager. But was that really a preloading of applications themselves?
I’m not sure because memory was scarce at that time. People were more patient too.
Yeah, from what I recall MS’s MOM, and for that matter Novell/Wordperfect’s competing DAD (Desktop Application Director) were simply launchers, they didn’t to my knowledge preload the actual apps into memory, since the average system back then wouldn’t realistically have had enough memory to have all of them resident anyhow.
97 was the first version I’ve used. I think it had this thing it added to the autorun, which I removed to make the PC boot faster.
If 97 didn’t do it, 2000 surely did.
On Windows builds of LibreOffice I disable QuickStarter as I am not opening or editing documents often enough to justify it being resident: https://documentation.libreoffice.org/assets/Uploads/Documentation/en/GS5.2/HTML/GS5201-IntroducingLibreOffice.html#__RefHeading__22043_697337876
Word 2007 launches instantly, word 2021 makes me watch the launch box for 10 seconds for any docx, even if another instance of word was running. What’s the justification for wasting minutes out of my day?
Sandboxing? My guess is they run in separate memory spaces, but i havent used a microsoft office product since the 2003 series.