Benchmarking Microsoft Office has dilemmas. Microsoft Office 95 through Office XP install quick starters under various names in the Startup folder. These include Fast Start and Microsoft Office Startup Assistant (OSA). Their purpose is to improve startup performance by preloading Office into memory because hard drives are slow. Office 2003 and 2007 no longer load the OSA by default. The reason is likely because Windows XP introduced a prefetcher at the operating system level.

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