Word needs to die

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Or possibly a curse on Bill Gates would do.

I'm still having issues with Word - in fact, more issues than I was having before. I'm at the point now where it crashes at least once a day, and it's really starting to fucking piss me off. Usually, it happens when I haven't been using Word for a while, and I go back to a document, and it'll give me a few minutes (just enough time to make changes, but usually not enough time to save them), and then it'll freeze up and I'll get a message that says "Microsoft Word has stopped working." It always searches for solutions, but never finds any, and then it restarts and usually I've lost whatever my most recent changes were.

I've checked at least a dozen different message boards trying to figure out what the issue is, but half the time I can't figure out what the hell they're talking about. I've run Office Diagnostics, I've deleted the normal.dotx template, I don't have any add-ins, I've downloaded some kind of patch that was supposed to fix it and didn't do a thing. Someone suggested it might be a printer driver, but I don't even use a printer. I haven't tried uninstalling and reinstalling Office, partly because that would be a pain in the ass, and also because from what I was reading, it seemed like that wouldn't help, but if someone thinks it's a good idea, I'd probably do anything.

I have a piece of shit Dell with Vista and Word 2007, so if anyone has any suggestions, I'm all ears.

One thing I know for sure - my next computer, I'm so incredibly going back to a Mac. I can't stand this shit.

Comments

[cs28.livejournal.com]

Office 2007 is a pain!
We have Dell computers in the office. They run on Vista Business and we use Office 2007. We hardly use Word but we do use Excel, which used to crash constantly. So I've been googling for solutions and remember stumbling on the following websites.
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;940791 (http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;940791) and http://forums.techguy.org/business-applications/584360-solved-word-2007-vista-crash.html (http://forums.techguy.org/business-applications/584360-solved-word-2007-vista-crash.html)
Another reason it crashes constantly might be caused by the "automatic save" option. http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/HP101407291033.aspx#15 (http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/HP101407291033.aspx#15) I disabled this in Excel and we no longer have frequent crashes.
Hope any of these solutions help you out!

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Another reason it crashes constantly might be caused by the "automatic save" option.

Huh, well, that's sort of a Catch-22, isn't it, since I started using the automatic save because the program was crashing so much...

Thanks for the tips!

[dragonflylady77.livejournal.com]

I use Word for Mac on my MacBook. Macs rule.

Sorry I can't offer anymore advice. My PC is so slow that when you start Word, you have time to go make and eat breakfast before it's ready for you, so...

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Oi, new Mac, here I come, lol.

[bendy1.livejournal.com]

I refuse to use Office any more, it's such a huge, heavy programme and totally unreliable.

I use Notepad Professional now because it does everything I need it to and nothing more.

Sodding programmes :(

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Gah! You know, I have XP and Office 2002 on my computer in work and never have a problem... which only reinforces my belief that Microsoft is just making their software shittier and charging people more money for it.

[annerose.livejournal.com]

Could be that word has become corrupted in some of those crashes. You might need a fresh install.

Also, check to see if the amount of memory used keeps going up and up (task manager), if so, it's got a memory leak, and that requires a reboot and eventually a patch from the vendor.

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I've gotten some weird memory notices - occasionally, when I open a Word document, it'll say "insufficient memory to display the selected font" or something like that, but it's always a perfectly normal font, and it doesn't appear to affect anything, so I usually ignore it. I know I've used the task manager before, but I can't seem to find it again...

[annerose.livejournal.com]

In Vista I'm not sure. Forever the exe has been taskmgr.exe You can try that in whatever passes for a Run command these days.

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Ah, found it! Uh... the Physical Memory says this:

Total 893 MB
Cached 365 MB
Free 4 MB

The Cached/Free ratio keeps fluctuating, but Free doesn't seem to go above 25ish.

Kernel Memory (I don't know what that is) says this:

Total 107 MB
Paged 75 MB
Nonpaged 31 MB

Is that good or bad?

[annerose.livejournal.com]

What I do is watch the memory in use, in task manager, Processes tab, sort by Mem Usage.

Then watch and see if the problem child keeps increasing its usage until a certain point when crashing normally follows.

It's not a very quick process, but it is good evidence for tech support types.

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Hmm... seems to be holding steady for now, but I'll keep watching and see if anything changes. Thanks!