Microsoft brings back Office application preloading from the ’90s

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?