Problem with MS Office Word 2003 slowing computer. Please help! Yikes!?

Question

I am doing transcriptions, and when I do the work in an online form provided for transcription, I can steam along at a decent speed.  But the minute I open my MS Office 2003 Word, the computer slows down.  I may type chest pain, but all that will show on the screen is cest pan, for instance.  After a few minutes, other open programs on my desktop (like my transcription platform and my word expander) just slow down and become unreliable, and cease to respond to foot pedal commands.  There is also quite frequently a whooshing sound in the computer when this happens (only in Office Word, never otherwise).  If I open Task Manager, it shows no other applications active, no weird processes, no excessive activity, and I have background updates etc. disabled because this is a small, older computer.  I control all this.

This is a second hand computer, and I know I need a newer one, but this has to do for now.  I have done transcription on it on and off for years, and it works like a charm.  I have a good antivirus and a good firewall, and I keep this little computer humming.  The programs came installed, and I do not have CDs to reinstall them.  I own no license that I know of related to Office, but I would like to go to a website, uninstall and then reinstall Office without an upgrade.  I would not want to lose my files, of course.  

So here's my question:  Is there a website I can go to that would diagnose this problem?  Or is there some way to uninstall then reinstall but not lose my files?  Jeez.  This is a pain in the fanny.  Please help.

Anonymous · Accepted Answer

I suspect that it's not Word that's slowing the computer, but something else slowing it enough that Word is running slower.

Finding out why a computer is running slowly isn't a job for the average user to tackle - you have to understand how a computer operates (inside - what happens at the chip level and the machine code level) to have a decent chance of not causing more problems than you already have.  There's no website that will diagnose the problem, you need a human being with experience to diagnose it.

You don't lose your files if you reinstall Office (unless you're saving them in your Office folders).  But reinstalling Office isn't going to do anything.  Word is working.  If Word were corrupt it would crash, it wouldn't run slow.  (Deleting Normal.dot has about 1 chance in a thousand of doing anything.)

"If I open Task Manager, it shows no other applications active" - but the processes (in the processes tab) are also applications, and they can slow the computer.

"There is also quite frequently a whooshing sound"  That could be disk access.  If you don't have enough RAM for the programs you're running, things get swapped to disk - and the computer crawls.  Run fewer programs at once.

? · Answer

Microsoft workplace 2007 and 2010 use a various record form for saving pages than 2003, so which you will not be able to open 2007 and 2010 records in 2003. there's a unfastened open source and criminal application referred to as libreoffice that i exploit on my pc and it fairly is able to open 2007 and 2010 data.

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Problem with MS Office Word 2003 slowing computer. Please help! Yikes!?

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