Whenever I write one of these posts, there's a good chance that I'm doing so using WordPad. I know some people are probably wondering why, so I should probably start by answering that.

I don't use Microsoft Office because I'm not paying $80 for a word processor. I don't use LibreOffice because it's crashy, needs to be updated manually, and unfamiliar. I know WordPad has no spell-checking, but that doesn't bother me because I'm confidrnt enough in my spellig. I know WordPad doesn't have all the fancy formatting options, but I'm using it for writing blogs, not billion-dollar business transactions... WordPad just opens right to a blank page, not a menu, and not some other bullshit. Oh, and it opens in less than a second, compared with all the other programs that need to start up their add-ons and spell-checkers.

For the past little while, however, WordPad has been awfully slow to open. No, I don't mean awfully slow by WordPad's standards, which would mean it opens in 3 seconds or more, I mean it's so slow that the sea level has risen another meter by the time WordPad actually opens. It takes at least 4 minutes to open after I click on it, and I really don't know why. Oh, and did I mention that it works just fine on every computer except for my laptop? Because that's apparently a thing. There shouldn't be any reason why my laptop takes so long to open it, it has an m.2 SSD with a DRAM cache and a relatively recent processor (2nd-gen Ryzen), so what's going on?

Again, I'm not sure. I've tried opening it from the Program Files folder, from the Start menu, from a shortcut, and that makes no difference. I've opened it with the Task Manager open, and resource usage doesn't see any real spike when WordPad is initializing, eliminating the possibility of resources maxing out. The only theory I have left is that an update went horribly wrong and slowed down WordPad on my laptop.

I don't know, I just... don't know. (Insert Brent Leroy promoting the Corner Gas website here)