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Subject:Re: Word 97 problem solved From:Laurence Burrows <burrows -at- IBM -dot- NET> Date:Mon, 14 Dec 1998 10:20:14 +1100
Some days ago I wrote:
--------------snip
MS Word uses system resources in proportion to the number of 'features'
that are operating: graphics display, fancy formatting, cross-references,
long documents, etc. You can overcome many MS Word <problems> by giving it
'more RAM' -- a document that runs like a dog on a PC with only 24Mb should
fly with 64Mb. Bruce Ashley, a long-time user of MS Word to produce 100+
page documents, told me that 90% of the problems ascribed to Word
performance could be traced back to insufficient memory.
--------------snip
Since then, Bruce has given me an update:
--------------snip
Hi Laurence,
You are broadly correct. This will solve many of Word's problems, but you
are still treating the symptoms and not the main causes.
There are four main issues. The CPU, the memory, the operating system and
the autosave features.
All my larger documents were initially created using Word 6 and by the time
I upgraded to Word 8, I had numerous work-arounds in place and so didn't
play with Word 8 as much.
I had difficulty with documents over about 60 pages until I upgraded to a
P150 running Windows 95. This solved 75% of my problems. The rest were
resolved by turning off the autosave features and finally increasing the
memory. Having less than 16 meg is awkward (32 or even 64 is better).
It is important to turn off the automatic save features of Word (e.g.
autosave and fastsave) as Word stores this information along with header
information. This makes the files disproportionately large and cumbersome
as the autosave information keeps growing. I don't know how to remove it
(nor does Microsoft in Sydney).
++++
What the original poster did was to simply move his file along with all the
unnecessary baggage. He has to get rid of the baggage. When I came across
this problem I solved it by cutting SECTIONS and pasting them in a new
document with autosave features off.
My work-around also included converting to text before the cut and paste. I
also re-added my graphics.
Takes time but it works.
I don't know if Word 8 has fixed any of these issues so I hope this helps.
--------------snip
