Word hangs when opening files

[Lazydog13]

I have a 133mhz pentium with Windows 95, 80 mb ram, and 30% of my master drive free. I have Office 97 on my slave drive and 30% of its memory free. When I open Word, it opens at normal speed. But then when I open a file, it takes at least 30+ seconds to bring up the file regardless of size. Trying to print the file has same results. I have unchecked the boxes in Outlook journal and I have tried Find Fast with the directories current and by deleting them...makes no difference. I deleted Office 97 from my slave drive and installed it on my master drive and moved my swap file to my slave drive to keep some spare room on each drive. Didn't help. Also, in Excel, formatting rows and columns, or clicking bold or underline, etc. hangs it up.
Would appreciate ANY ideas.

 

[paulovey]

Hi,

Is it only slow in Word, do you have the same speed problems in excel, if so you need to be looking at the size of your sweap file in relation to the amount of free space you have..

Also you do not have a very high spec machine to run win95 133 with 80mb although above what ms recommends will never be fast, has it ever been fast. What has changed to make to go slow, any new software / hardware installed.

 

[Dreamboat]

Read Article III, take the maintenance steps:

http://www.helponthe.net/news/042000.html

Disable findfast in the control panel. Got anything else running in the background that isn't necessary? Hit ctrl-alt-del and post it here if you're unsure.

No problems running Office 97 on a 133 w/80M Ram. Not fast, but you shouldn't experience this slowness.

Do you have Outlook installed? Whether you use it or not, go into the journal in Outlook and make sure NOTHING is checked.

Let me know whether this helps or not. Perhaps we need to do more...


techsupportgirl@home.com
Brainbench MVP for Microsoft Word

http://www.brainbench.com

 

[Lazydog13]

Hi,
It is mainly in Word only. After I open the first document, others open at normal speed. Docs in Excel open at normal speed, but if I, for example, click Bold for a cell, I get the hourglass for about 10 seconds. Thereafter, I can click Bold on any amount of cells and no hourglass. Each time I open Word, I have the same problem opening that first file. If I don't close it, I can open other documents at normal speed. I never had a problem running Win95 and when I first loaded Office 97, I didn't have these problems and haven't made any hardware changes. I have added a few small programs, but no problems have been noted.
Another thing that I have noticed is that when I click Print in Word or Excel or even in some of my other programs like Printhouse, I get real slow printer response. I have deleted the printer driver and re-installed, but that didn't help either.

 

[Dreamboat]

Did you try what I suggested first, Lazy? I work for an over-the-phone software support company answering phones all day. About 30% of PROBLEM calls are due to improper or nonexistent maintenance of the PC.
techsupportgirl@home.com
Brainbench MVP for Microsoft Word

http://www.brainbench.com

 

[Lazydog13]

Dreamboat,
I performed scandisk, defrag, unchecked all boxes in Outlook journal, stopped Find Fast, cleared my systray, all to no avail. The first doc I open in Word took 13 seconds, and each doc after that 2 secs. If I close Word and click on one of the same docs, it takes the 13 secs for it to open that first doc again. As long as I don't close Word, it is normal.

 

[Dreamboat]

Okay. Did ya delete the temps like it says? That's the most important part. You should also empty your C:\windows\temp folder. Hey, I didn't say you have to empty your recycle bin, right? Hee hee. Listen, if you didn't do it before, do it now and scandisk again (defrag not necessary again). Then, I want you to restart. Find normal.dot and rename it to oldnormal.dot and then launch Word.

If that doesn't work, close Word, get into your registry and go to hkey_current_user\software\microsoft\office\8.0\word and rename the Word folder to OldWord and then relaunch Word.

One of these has GOT to work. If they don't, I'm going to suggest you use Eraser97 to completely uninstall Office, then reinstall Office.
techsupportgirl@home.com
Brainbench MVP for Microsoft Word

http://www.brainbench.com

 

[Lazydog13]

Dreamboat,
I performed all of your last suggestions with no change. I haven't erased it yet tho. I have Eraser v4.10.366 but not Eraser 97, don't know if there is much diff. Yesterday, I did delete Office from slave drive and installed it on master drive, but it didn't help, so I moved it back to slave cause I have much more room.

 

[Dreamboat]

Lazy, never heard of 4.10 whatever. You can download 97 at

http://www.freedrive.com.

User username Templates (case-sensitive) and password 123456

Look, I don't know the difference between my registry entry and the following command line--I think they're the same but not sure, so you ought to try it, it won't hurt anything at this point:

Start-Run and type:

winword.exe /regserver (yes, there's a space before the slash)

If it can't find it, you'll need to include the path to winword.exe in front of the other text and try again.

Damn. Pardon my French, but I wish we were getting somewhere. I'm puzzled over this one. Guess you're frustrated out of your mind by now!
techsupportgirl@home.com
Brainbench MVP for Microsoft Word

http://www.brainbench.com

 

[Dreamboat]

PS: Gotta go for tonight. Feel free to email me, tho, 'cause I won't get back on until tomorrow night (maybe).
techsupportgirl@home.com
Brainbench MVP for Microsoft Word

http://www.brainbench.com

 

[Lazydog13]

Well, I used Eraser 97 and reloaded Office97 and now the docs load in 8 seconds instead of 15....progress....thanks for all your help.

 

[alighieri]

I am having a similar problem where I work. We have incredible lag times when opening files in all Office applications (mostly Word and Excel). It can take up to 3 1/2 minutes to open any document, stored locally or on the network. I regularly maintain my pc (delete temp files and defrag once a week). Printing from Word of Excel will freeze the computer for at least 1-2 minutes every time. Any advice you have would be appreciated. I will include our system information below.

Network : Novell 4.11 with some NT 4.0
OS : Windows 2000 Professional SP-2
Computers : Compaq Deskpro EN (3 affected)
733 Mhz
128 MB ram

Dell Optiplex GX 150 (10+ affected)
1 Ghz
128 to 256 MB ram

Gateway E-4200 (10+ affected)
300 to 600 Mhz
64 to 256 MB ram

If you need any other information, please let me know

 

[donna6197]

Has Word/Excel always behaved this way, since installation, or did it begin to occur when something was changed/updated/installed ...

 

[alighieri]

It has been this way since install. It only affects our new Windows 2000 Pro machines...all our 95b, 98se, and NT4 workstation machines work properly. I have reinstalled office 97 SR-2 on my machine and it made no difference. I also restored my computer from the compaq restore cd set and reinstalled office again. Still no change.