Slow Word (Office 97)

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I’m having this problem that slows word down and has my brain itchin’: when using word, sometimes a while after I open a document, sometimes just 10 secs afterwards, word will start to freeze, but the program is not hung. It won’t move but in certain moments, say, periods that range from 3 to 5 secs aprox. So I can move the cursor about, but it will show the icon it was showing the last time word “froze”. 5 secs or so, and it updates. Then it freezes again immediatly. The same thing happens to the writing, formatting, and every other action/command. I type a phrase and the screen stays still; when it comes of time, it updates. Then back to frozen state.
The only thing that seems to stop this “freeze” issue is the scrollbar; that is, you press on a scrollbar button (up / down, doesn’t matter), and if word is “frozen”, it will take the 5 secs until it takes the command. From that point, word won’t freeze until you release the mouse button. It will scroll up/down just smoothly. When you let go of the button, flash! Frozen again.
Apart from this, word works normally. This happens in more than one document.

This glitch is really annoying. Any clues?

TIA

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Hi Diego:
From what you say, it’s not clear if something is happening in Word or with something running in the background. I’m guessing a bit.
1. If it’s happening with only certain documents, you may have corruption. I don’t know if there’s anything special about these documents, such as numerous complex tables or something that is repaginating a long document.
2. You don’t mention your operating system, but Ctrl+Alt+Del will usually bring up a list of running processes. If using Windows 9x, try ending each of the tasks, one at a time, except for winword, Explorer, & systray. After ending each one, see if the problem persists.
3. Do you have any add-ins or macros that are running? Check by looking at Tools/Templates & add-iins to see what is loaded. You can also press Alt+F8 to see what macros are contained in the templates or document. It would be unusual for a macro to be causing such a persistent problem, as I would not expect it to be running all the time, but weirder things have happened.

That’s just a few things to get you started.

Hope this helps.

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Phil,

1) It doesn’t happen with certain documents. It will happen randomly during any session with word. These documents don’t have complex tables, but what do you mean by “something that is repaginating a long document”?
2) My OS is Win98. I’ll try these and let you know the outcome.
3) The only macro in Normal.dot has one line to paste unformatted text (revealed to me by a Woody’s issue). Anyway, I have added the code just recently and this problem has been going on since a big while now. The other documents don’t have macros. As for the add-ins, yes, I have PDFMaker.dot checked. I don’t know if this plug-in may lead to this chaos (not so, but reeeeeeally annoying) .

Thanks for your advice

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I’m still guessing to a certain extent. By repagination, I was thinking of something like updating a TOC in a long document or switching to print layout view from normal view. If it’s happening randomly (always a suspicious circumstance), it could be something else running on your machine. That’s why you need to isolate the problem by eliminating other processes 1 at a time.

I haven’t used PDFmaker but you might try unloading the template & see if there’s a difference. Maybe someone else may have other ideas.

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Neither of the documents I use have TOCs, so if repaginating refers only to them, it doesn’t seem a likely cause.

—- Featured space

Wrath quencher:

TODAY IT WAS WORSE THAN EVER!!!! Ask my keyboard how hard my fingertips (and, eventually, knuckles) stroke.

—– End of Featured Space

Sorry, needed that. Back to it, I did terminate every application other than Winword, Explorer, and Systray, just as you said, but this didn’t seem to have made any difference. Word would go “Freeze!” whenever it pleased. Just hate its “you-got-one-sec-write-sum’n-if-you-can” fashion.
PDF maker is a part of the Adobe Acrobat Suite (at least in ver. 4.0), and the template adds another toolbar (PDF) with just one button, to create the PDF files right away. I did unload it but didn’t work either.

Phil, thanks for your help anyway.

Any other suggestions will be very welcome.

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Sounds like maybe you have gazillions of .tmp files cluttering things up.

Has Word ever crashed on your PC in the past? If so, it doesn’t do its housekeeping and you will find lots of .tmp files that were left behind.

Do a search of your C: drive for anything ending in .tmp (with Word closed) and delete ALL of them!

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Hi, Van.

I keep my PC clear of TMPs, CHKs, OLDs, and BAKs. Not that I will delete all of the last three types, just the ones I know that are useless.
Regarding PC crushes… well, Win98 crashed so many times and so often… I know many of the crashes were due to Word, but I can’t tell how many or why. What’s worse, I don’t remember when this problem started happening – maybe I had it from the moment I was given this pc (at work), but as I thought there was no solution to it, I didn’t pay any attention… until I found the Lounge. From then on, I started paying more attention to every detail thinking things could be improved, and so far, facts have proved me right .
Anyway, I don’t know when it started, but I know it’s getting worse. It’s never taken me sooo long to dispatch a commercial proposal.

Any other clues?

Thanks a lot

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You have “Fast Saves” turned off, right? How big are these documents? There is a maximum file size in Word.

PDFMaker causes no problems for me, I use it all the time.

You say you were given this PC in the office. In my experience, network installation desktops are more complex and crash prone than individual computers so I’ve seen a lot of crashes caused by Word and consider them “normal,” particularly if there is a DMS (such as DocsOpen or iManage) in the mix.

But, back to your specific problem: Are there standard desktop Word templates stored on a server somewhere in the office that you can copy down to your desktop? The problem you report sounds like a bad (or corrupted) global template to me (maybe Normal.dot).

If so, refresh your template(s) by replacing them. If you have a tech staff this should not be an unusual request for them. If not, you can start with a clean template yourself by renaming Normal.dot to Normal.bak with Word closed. Then re-open Word and it will create a new Normal.dot for you. If you’ve done this already and/or you have multiple global templates, then things rapidly get more complicated and I defer to Phil and Andrew and Geoff, et al.

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Hi Van,

As I said in my last reply to Phil, a friend worked things out for me. Anyway, before he came up with the solution, I noticed I had “Fast Saves” turned on. I turned it off but it didn’t make any difference.
I just wanted to know what use it is of. What good/wrong will it do if I turn it on again?

Thanks

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Fast Saves may have been another source of your problems! Fast Save “appends” changes to a file instead of “saving” them into the file. This leads to potential corruption…Back when computers were slow this might have saved faster…

General advice has been to avoid “Fast Saves” like the plague.

Search “Fast Save” on the site to see some threads on this topic.

V

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A year or so ago I noticed that some not very complex word files I was working on ranged from 3-6 Mb and realised that if I used “save as” instead of “save”, the big files would turn into normal, say, 300 Kb ones.
Are this oversized files the result of what you call “appending changes” by the Fast Save feature?
Does “Save As” skip this feature and just save the entire document from scratch?

Thanks

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Among other things (list templates) yes — the file “bloating” problem can be caused by Fast Saves — I believe you are right — a Save As does not do a Fast Save if enabled. So make sure Fast Saves is OFF.

Others on this board know more about list templates and their management.

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>>Are this oversized files the result of what you call “appending changes” by the Fast Save feature?<>Does “Save As” skip this feature and just save the entire document from scratch?<<

Yes. And so does a regular save if you make any change after switching off fast saves.

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Phil, Val, thanks a lot. Guess I’ll steer clear from Fast Save. I even had a toolbar button for “Save As” with a smiley button and in the description field I wrote “&S” so it would show an underlined “S” beside the smiley, and every time I hit Alt + S the “Save As” dialog box would show. That way I kept my files from “bloating”. But there’s no need for this workaround any more – the Lounge tackled it right where it hurts.

See ya around!

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It sounds like you may already have done this, but with all the crashes, did you run scandisk & then do a defrag (BTW, I downloaded the defrag that came with WinMe & it works much faster on Win98).

I should have thought of this before. Start Word from the command line (Start/Run) & type

winword.exe /a

That will start Word without any add-ins & without your normal.dot. Open your documents & see if the problem occurs. If not, then it’s one of your add-ins or a corrupt normal.dot. You might then see if any of the add-ins are causing a problem by renaming or removing them from startup & then adding them back in one at a time. Do the same with normal.dot.

I can sense your frustration. Sometimes I think I’d be better off with a quill pen (or even a stone & chisel) .

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It sounds like you may already have done this, but with all the crashes, did you run scandisk & then do a defrag (BTW, I downloaded the defrag that came with WinMe & it works much faster on Win98).

I should have thought of this before. Start Word from the command line (Start/Run) & type

winword.exe /a

That will start Word without any add-ins & without your normal.dot. Open your documents & see if the problem occurs. If not, then it’s one of your add-ins or a corrupt normal.dot. You might then see if any of the add-ins are causing a problem by renaming or removing them from startup & then adding them back in one at a time. Do the same with normal.dot.

I can sympathize with your frustration. Sometimes I think I’d be better off with a quill pen (or even a stone & chisel) .

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Phil, Van,

Thanks a lot for your help. Someone told me a solution (or at least something that makes word work) for the problem. And it was sooooooo simple!!!!!! Just go to Tools | Options, click on the Orthography and Grammar tab and uncheck the “Check grammar while writing” checkbox. That did perfectly. Word has never been this fast.
What I still can’t figure, however, is why the problem became gradually worse. The last days two days it was a real pain. That’s why it took me so long to get back to you (had to make up for all the lost time with word).

Thanks again

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Thanks for getting back with the solution that worked for you. I’ve always turned check grammer off, as well as spellcheck as you type–I just check at the end. I have several documents that Word balks at even trying to spellcheck, as it says I have too many edits. That’s why it will get slower over time; it has more to check.

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