Word 2003 so-o-o-o-o slo-o-o-o-ow

[McLauchlan, Kevin]

Well, I got to Barbara's suggestion before yours, so I did essentially
the same thing by deleting the graphic elements one-at-a-time to see
what happened.

Naturally, it is the company-supplied page-background graphic that is
the culprit.

The entire document is (still only) 1935KB, all-in. I don't consider
that big.
Taking out just the product photo reduces it to 1741KB and does not
affect the slowdown.
Taking out just the first-page background graphic gets rid of the
slowdown and reduces the Word file size from 1935KB to 823KB.  That's a
significant difference with respect to the overall document size, but
it's relatively INsignificant with respect to the sizes of documents I
often have open in Word.  So, why would Word care?

Also, I've got a decent video card with plenty of video memory, so I
don't see rendering for display of page 1 being a colossal drain on
resources. 
So, what gives?
I expected, by now, that a few of the people who always chime in with
how good Word is if you only take the time to understand it... would
have chimed in with the proper approach to get around this little
annoyance.

Cheers,

Kevin

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Gene Kim-Eng [mailto:techwr at genek.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, April 01, 2008 12:34
> To: McLauchlan, Kevin; techwr-l at lists.techwr-l.com
> Subject: Re: Word 2003 so-o-o-o-o slo-o-o-o-ow
> 
> Try using the options tool to display picture placeholders
> instead of images.  If everything speeds up, it is the
> graphics.  How big are the original graphic files?
> 
> Gene Kim-Eng
> 
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "McLauchlan, Kevin" <Kevin.McLauchlan at safenet-inc.com>
> To: <techwr-l at lists.techwr-l.com>
> Sent: Tuesday, April 01, 2008 9:17 AM
> Subject: Word 2003 so-o-o-o-o slo-o-o-o-ow
> 
> 
> > Hey gang, anybody know why Word would slow to a crawl and cause CPU
> > usage to peg at 100% - on an otherwise capable and not overloaded
> > machine with plenty of extra memory - only when I'm on the first
page
> > of
> > a 5-page doc and either typing or scrolling? That page has a
full-page
> > background graphic and also has a photo of the product, while pages
2
> > through 5 are text and a 3-cm-tall page-width background graphic (in
> > other words, it fills the bottom margin below the text area.
> >
> > I don't see the presence of the photo on page one being the cause,
> > because it's just not that big.... the whole file generates a
> > Postscript
> > file that's only 6MB, so really.......

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