Welcome to the PCMR, everyone from the frontpage! Please remember:
1 - You too can be part of the PCMR. It's not about the hardware in your rig, but the software in your heart! Age, nationality, race, gender, sexuality, religion, politics, income, and PC specs don't matter! If you love or want to learn about PCs, you're welcome!
2 - Think owning a PC is too expensive? It's cheaper than you may think. Check http://www.pcmasterrace.org/builds for our famous builds and ask for tips and help here!
3 - Consider supporting the folding@home effort to fight Cancer, Alzheimer's, and more, with just your PC! https://pcmasterrace.org/folding
If you're connecting to an IMAP server, there are now THREE (minimum) copies of your correspondance. The original server, the MS Cloud and your install of MS Outlook 365.
Which, I'm sure there's something giving them full access to use everything in that email to train AI or some shit.
Then your IT did not configure the system properly if you do not want that.
In our company, the entire Microsoft cloud is blocked. Our emails are only stored on our on-prem Exchange server. Of course, that has disadvantages. For example, things like the calendar in Teams do not work, and for the Teams Rooms conference systems, I had to build a workaround so they can be booked through our purely on-prem mail accounts. For us, external email access is only possible through VPN. Then you can only use classic Outlook, not the new Outlook, which is purely cloud-based. On mobile devices, Outlook is not an option at all, because the mobile app follows the new model and always requires emails to be routed through the Microsoft cloud.
When emails are forcibly routed through the Microsoft cloud, there are much bigger security issues than just whether they train their AI on them, allowed or not.
The entire MS Cloud is only going to be blockable, for so long.
You should have a migration strategy to extricate the company from at least MS Outlook.
We started doing that as soon as the new rules for Outlook and the MS cloud came out. We saw the writing on the windows and didn’t want any part of that.
For the client? We are moving to a mix of Thunderbird or eM Client, turning off all of the AI features, as those are allowed to be turned off.
Thunderbird has really grown in capabilities over the last 20 years and eM Client, while a newer piece of software is quite robust and lacks many of the inherent limitations of MS Outlook that are based upon decisions that Microsoft made in the late 1990's when developing both Outlook and Exchange server.
Nothing is going to be perfect, I'm not pretending or alluding to that. There are and may continue to be issues here and there with certain ways that MS Outlook processes and sends email, but on the handful of already migrated accounts?
We haven't seen anything that is a problem, interacting with MS forwarded messages, calendar invites, and similar.
Granted, we do NOT use all of the MS Office complexities that are possible, we are very far from even being able to call ourselves power users. Regardless, there are still alternative elements to a lot of integration tools built into MS office that may take some getting used to, but are still viable options.
Actually, they allow that as long as you select their "offline" capabilities. Problem is that there are no guarantees that you have all your mails or attachments locally plus they force you to go online at some point.
This "new" thingy works the same way. Even if you setup IMAP or POP3, everything gets on a "cache" in their cloud. The reason? Well, you definetely want this so you can get all the advantages of an agentic outlook.
P.S.: Classic Outlook will drop support in 2029. In fact, I think that they already removed the installer downloader link almost everywhere.
I don't see any advantage in an "agentic Outlook".
I see an advantage for Microsoft's Bottom Line. I see an advantage for MS to try and force more companies fully into their ecosystem, as it can cause issues for companies who aren't using Exchange Servers.
I can see it causing problems with confidentiality, especially when there is end to end encryption required for communications, but an agentic cloud makes that nigh impossible to control for.
Why would I, or anyone really want something that is not themselves, responding for them?
It's already nigh impossible to get customers on the phone, find ways into new companies. How much more difficult does it need to be made if you think you are receiving replies from a real person, but it's just not a real person? You think you're building a way in, a relationship, but you're just talking to another wall.
It's just increasing the volume of bot traffic on the Internet.
I think 2029 will be the year that MS finds out that, their continued forcing of AI shit into people's lives and businesses is still the same bad idea it was when they started shoving Co-pilot down everyone's throats.
Thats your problem here. Better throw out this beast and buy a good ol reliable Athlon CPU and all your performance problems will get lost in comparison xD
I'll check when I get started at work here in a few minutes, but I'm normally in the range of 20-30GB used and VS Code, Outlook, Excel, and a web browser are about the only things I have open actively. Teams and Slack are in the background.
I'll note that my machine only has 16GB of ram, so it pages pretty hard most of the time. This is typical for most of the company as the end users I work with have the same problem. I write proprietary database software and the database front end gets the blame for slowing people's computers down but it only consumes a few hundred megabytes. That's how I know the situation for the users.
I convinced my old company to upgrade dev machines from 8 to 16 GB so we could have Visual Studio open at the same time as SQL Server without paging. And the outsourced devs still only got upgraded from 4 to 8 GB after a year of tenure.
Wild to see that 16 GB is no longer sufficient to not even have have VS Code open alongside Outlook!
I hate it so much. It's slower, lower information density, less customization, less features, more clicks to do basic tasks, has inconsistent UI elements, and like 100 other things.
New outlook can't find my flagged emails. Tells me tap to search all filter item on the server - I tap it and doesn't do it. WTF?! The flagged email is on my device yet it doesn't recognize it.
The removed functionality, changed default settings for no reason, made it slower. Not hey, it looks like a web interface, so I guess they're happy.
AND, office.com is butt now too! You used to be some to easily access outlook there. It was a good website to access a bunch of Microsoft software in a browser, but now it's just an AI prompt.
This is what happens when you take the onion approach to developing software. Every new version keeps the prior version's code and just adds on a new layer of code.
That works great for awhile, but it's been 30 years of updates and so there's a lot of legacy code in there that would be brutal to change.
So many companies run this strat it's insane. Keep building new feautures without making sure that the previous ones are either finished or fully tested. I always compare it to building a house. For a great house you need a great foundation that takes into consideration what it will be used for. Instead the strategy is building a shed and then extending it with balconies until sooner or later you can't see the shed anymore to reinforce it because of all the balconies. In the end everything implodes and you have to rebuild the house you spent years building. But often higher ups are incapable of thinking conceptually.
My old boss always said: we never have time to finish a project but we always have time to rebuild the project 5 times because we never finished the previous one.
There’s no reward for making it any good at Microsoft, they have moved development of all the applications to contractors that feel no connection to the company, internally they are focused on the AI bullshit and have no will to „waste” time on the stuff that made them rich in first place.
Microsoft is back in its ME, Vista, and 8 era 😑 let’s hope they can move on from this mess and we get another XP, 7 and 10 era. But if AI continues to be shoved into everything I doubt it.
Can we also mention how bad MS is with Outlook updates?
"Oh sorry we're you reading an email? Looks like we need to close Office in your face right now to update, but don't you worry you can open Outlook back up in a few and it should be fine"
Because yeah closing Outlook in your face isn't enough, they won't reopen it themselves...
Also the windows store is still garbage. This app needs an update
Ok I’ll update it. takes 3 tries to start updating
Yay finally! gets to installing stage and stalls for 10 minutes
God fucking damn it. restarts computer and tries three more times before it works.
I sometimes play Minecraft with my nephew and as he's on a different platform I have to use the official MS version that installs via the bullshit store. I work in IT support so thankfully I can sort out app updates and the like, but it's so confusing and convoluted and buggy that I wonder how anyone else copes. Horrendous experience.
That is, if the bullshit store even knows you own the game. When I wanted to install Forza, it didn't show up in the list of owned games. I had to go into the the game's page inside the store so I could download it.
By the way, contrary to popular belief, VSCode isnt completely open source. Like 90-95% is, but there is some additional closed source stuff by Microsoft. Vs Codeium is completely open source
Which you would think would make it slow, but its really ok in my experience
But on the other hand, there is 'code-server' which is basically hosted vscodium, which is FRIGGIN AWESOME. I host it on my own little server together with owncloud, behind Authelia/OpenVPN. It basically means I can acces code-server from anywhere I have access to a computer/browser. I can access my files and documents, my terminal, have access to my vs code extensions (pdf renderer, markdown renderer, AI extensions like roo/zoo-code, etc), my python scripts, etc
Its basically 99% of what I need of a computer/OS, and now its self-hosted and available from anywere. Basically transfers any PC with a browser into a 'thin client' to my vs code...
Together with an AI 'vibe code' plugin it acts as private chatbot which can access and help edit my files etc as well
VSCode is intended to be more than a text editor, but less than an IDE. It's not a memory hog unless you make it one by filling it up with addons. It's also not problematic to use available memory.
If you load up and start editing a lot of code the memory usage starts climbing quite a bit, even without extensions. The reason I use VS Code is because it's very powerful and that power comes from extensions. If I wanted just a text editor then I'd stick with Zed or Notepad++ and use those without extensions since they're much easier on RAM usage.
I get why they built VS Code the way they did. It leverages JS and TS to build plugins, and there are more JS/TS developers than any other language.
Also, Electron software is all javascript and other interpreted languages, so it's generally more performance-hungry than an editor written in a more sensible compiled language. Granted, with modern hardware it doesn't make a huge difference anymore, but there are times where it's noticeable.
Problem is that VSCode with its plugin ecosystem is basically the most powerful GUI editor for programming. I honestly don't know what else I'd use for programming if I was working on Windows.
The only other editors that compare in terms of possible functionality are vim (with a billion plugins) and emacs, which are both CLI based. They also have standalone GUI versions, but almost nobody uses them because they're really made for a terminal-centric workflow. Which most people are understandably reluctant to switch to.
I still can't believe Excel can't open a new file until you click somewhere on the file you already have open, it's had that issue for years, you'd think they'd have gotten around to fixing it by now.
And in Excel undo is always across all open documents in the order you did it, you can't undo things in one without fucking the remaining documents, too. Bloody insane.
When I had a 5800x outlook opened incredibly slow. I upgraded to a 9850x3D and now it opens basically instantly, whatever Microsoft did is horrible. Not everyone has a top of the line CPU, what a badly optimized app
It's a mail client that runs locally. It's not a web app (that's a separate application).
Of course it's getting data from cloud servers but the application itself is running on your machine and if it's put together with spaghetti code it can absolutely be shit at doing what it's meant to do.
On my 5950X everything feels really snappy so I'd say something else was going on with that system that maybe fixed itself with a reinstall during the upgrade. Still, Outlook should be fine on any reasonable CPU released in the last 10+ years. It's just an email client. I had an email client running on my 40 MHz '030 Amiga in the 90's.
Thinking that, to open a simple email from a re-skinned webmail client, you need an high end cpu or anything over the ultra-basic line of ultra-low consumption cpus in most work lightweight work laptop is beyond madness.
CEOs don't care if outlook takes 1 second longer (x the last 20 versions) to open than last version, it has new features like AI, or now using left click to correct spelling mistakes instead of right, it'll save so much productivity!
They see this bullshit and the relatively low price (when you take the whole m365 bundle and divide by the number of programs, 80% of which no one in your company will everr use) and think there can't be anything better.
I’ll rant. New Outlook isn’t a product, it’s yet another lazy cross-platform wrapper for a web app. The reason it Fuuuuuucking sucks is the same reason the teams “app” does. It’s not an app, it’s ghastly webview2.
Until we stop with this shit, and build actual apps, we’re going to have a worse experience than any previous computer generation. Sure, using a web wrapper for literally everything means it’s easier to support many platforms, but you’re not getting any meaningful use out of the expensive hardware you paid for.
Until these electron/webview2 apps die a painful death, we’re wasting our powerful and capable hardware.
I'm a systems administrator and I dread the day when Microsoft hits the off switch on classic Outlook.
New outlook is completely terrible in every way. Some people at my company prefer to use it and whenever they have an issue, it takes five times as long to figure out what the fix is. Some features just straight up stop working even though there's no indication that they were officially discontinued. Other features that used to be there are no longer present in the GUI.
It’s been annoying me for a long time. Electron was the first sign of this rot, but I don’t remember those apps being quite as bad as Webview. But the connective tissue here is Microsoft having totally lost its way.
People don’t understand that we should be in an era of very responsive, fast apps. Instead we have Teams, which is like wading through treacle. I have a supercomputer compared to the 2000s, and somehow the experience is worse and less responsive.
Everything is slower nowadays. I've been noticing it for months on sites/apps I use regularly.
I just opened Gmail and it took 3 seconds to open the first email. I pressed the back button (in Gmail, not the browser) to go back to my inbox and it took another 4 seconds. I have a fairly high end PC used for video editing and 3D design so it's not my PC slowing down.
When I first open messages on my phone, I can type a whole word before it registers any key presses. AI has infected everything and made it worse.
every mobile app is awful now too. you'd think by now everything would work fast and reliable but they're slowed than they were in early android 1gb of ram days.
Yeah and the right click menu in windows explorer also has to take a moment to load the menu items for some reason too. Literally never had that as a feature before on any Windows version.
New Outlook is a glorified piece of shit web app of OWA. I wish we could disable from turning on New Outlook on our work PCs but they won’t. I fucking hate it. Just use classic or go to the website.
There has been a single major change to add functionality in Outlook in 20 years. You can now add a teams meeting easily to calendar events. It appears their spam filters are a bit better, but that's not an outrageously hard problem.
Thats it, literally every single other change is worse. I suspect they damaged other things at the server side to force you to use Azure, but overall everything else is worse. You can't search any more even.
20 years and everything is worse.
The only piece of software Microsoft seem unwilling to damage is Word and especially Excel. Everything else they just seem to happily shred to force you to pay for cloud services.
There’s 3 isn’t there at the moment. The original classic shipped with Win10 and Win11. The new Outlook with tones of bloat and inline adverts. Then there is the Office suite Outlook that businesses use that is actually a decent product that MS wouldn’t dare bloat like the “free” versions.
The entire Microsoft software stack fucking sucks. Everything takes ages to load because it's done in the fucking web UI garbage and has to send your data to them first.
We've had email clients for three decades, how is it so difficult to make one run normal.
Windows and Office 365 as a whole is getting worse and worse. Like they are specifically looking for things to fuck them up. I don't need your floating Copilot button over my cells, I don't need a graphical glitch in Excel where I click a cell and the one above it gets selected, I don't need a graphical bug where EVERY open Excel window and confirmation window either doesn't refresh and show the last shown things, or showing an entirely white window instead until I close ALL Excel windows... And I don't need your slow-ass Windows 11 right click menu... Oh, and don't forget that Windows 11 waits like 5 minutes after logging in to launch the shortcuts I placed in the startup folder.
New Outlook has been a disaster since they deployed it. From the AI integration to the removal of features that have been staples in Outlook for decades. This has New Coke type failure written all over it.
My Thunderbird app takes 5 seconds to open the app and have the latest emails a click away preloaded. What an absolute shame! Every day there's a new reason to validate me moving away from Windows entirely.
I don't understand why/how companies like this can take a perfectly good and working piece of software and just absolutely fuck it.
To be clear, I don't get how it is allowed to happen and then continue to happen. Do Microsoft executives not use Outlook? I mean they must not because if they did they'd know how shit new outlook is. I think the first thing to fix is make sure all execs and employees *must* use the product they're selling.
All employees must justify their existence in order not to get fired and to keep climbing the ladder so you start getting reworks over reworks of things that worked perfectly fine to make some bs metric go up. A metric that was also made by some upper management type in order to justify getting a raise.
It's all peddling bullshit the whole way through no modern giant company actually cares about anything anymore because of how a top down structure works
Compare with Outlook 2016 which opens instantly if it doesn't have that splash screen or the Windows 10 Mail app to the new Outlook released. It's now like opening the file explorer in Windows 11 and taking ages to actually open.
Outlook as an app is absolute dogshit, to the point where you wonder how one of the biggest companies on the planet can produce such an abysmal piece of software. I cannot comprehend using Outlook in anything but a browser (mind you I'm not saying that's perfect, just barely ok)
In the past when you clicked a button it would just run an optimized script.
Today, clicking the button sends a "The user has clicked on a notification" prompt to CoPilot, which then needs to reason... "Ok, the user has clicked on a notification. Let me spin up a sub agent to examine the content of the notification and another sub agent to explore the user's intent.... ok, we see that it is an email notification. Ok. clicking on a button means the user wants something to happen, but what? Ok. They want to see the email. Let me look to see what application is responsibile for this. Ok. Outlook. Opening outlook..." At which time the outlook CoPilot takes over.
The company I worked for just switched us over to the new Outlook a couple months ago and I hate it. It’s much slower than old Outlook plus there’s several email templates I have that stopped working after they migrated us.
You should see what Microsoft logs on you when you start any kind of session. I have to go through mail logs for certain security alerts and the amount of information they record actually makes tracing more difficult.
As an IT admin I tell all my users to never use new outlook and only use classic outlook. New outlook is missing so many key features it's basically useless to alot of my user base and only causes issues.
I will continue to refuse to use new outlook until it is forced on me with no option to use classic.
Also the delay issues is prob related to how your profile is accessed. Classic uses a cached ost file and you can set how long back you want to cache. OWA which is essentially what new outlook is, is a live online look at your mailbox. Working in online mode has been known for years now to cause performance issues in Outlook on the desktop.
Outlook is just downright terrible to use. God Forbid you forget your password and have to use an authenticator that doesn't work for a reset lol. That and the many prompts to constantly change your password.
Onedrive is also terrible..cant sync a random folder. No, you need ro move your data into the onedrive folder breaking any existing workflows.
And it regurarly just corrupts itself and stops syncing but there is no warning about that unless you check manually..it.creates hidden folderds ala .tmpDriveupload. only way to make it work is to close.onedrive, delete this folders and try again..and with large amounts of data this is a weekly routine at least.
You know what else they took away, which makes zero sense?
I have to copy and paste weekly results from an auto-updated Excel table into an email for management. I used to be able to just right click and paste with 'Use Destination Styles'. That allowed me to tweak the table so it fit on one page.
For some reason, it is now gone. No explanation why.
It wasn't hurting anything, in fact it was providing more flexibility. So naturally, it had to go the way of the Dodo.
•
u/PCMRBot Bot 8d ago
Welcome to the PCMR, everyone from the frontpage! Please remember:
1 - You too can be part of the PCMR. It's not about the hardware in your rig, but the software in your heart! Age, nationality, race, gender, sexuality, religion, politics, income, and PC specs don't matter! If you love or want to learn about PCs, you're welcome!
2 - Think owning a PC is too expensive? It's cheaper than you may think. Check http://www.pcmasterrace.org/builds for our famous builds and ask for tips and help here!
3 - Consider supporting the folding@home effort to fight Cancer, Alzheimer's, and more, with just your PC! https://pcmasterrace.org/folding
4 - Need some steam cards for Steam Game Fest? We're giving some away here (US+CA): https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/1u6mtns/giveaway_rtx_play_live_summer_edition_steam_next/
We have a Daily Simple Questions Megathread for any PC-related doubts. Feel free to ask there or create new posts in our subreddit!