Continued random freezes!! Word 2004 11.2

[stedman]

iBook G4 768 mb 1.33 GHz

I have tried several things... turning off font duplicates, letting
Word recreate the Normal template, installing the latest update, etc.
but invariably, Word will freeze at some point, typically when opening
a document, but not always, and requiring a Force Quit. (And there is
no rhyme or reason as to which documents.) (By the way, on re-opening
the document that produced the freeze, Word will say this the document
was corrupt and would I like to have it recreate it as best as it
can... I always say NO!! and up comes the document without any problem
and without any text missing.)

To explore other solutions, I have tried accessing the trouble-shooting
pages at http://word.mvps.org/MacWordNew/TroubleshootingIndex.htm, but
the old trick of refresh the page in Safari has not been working for
several of the listed docs (e.g., damaged prefs). Ironic that a help
system founders on the leading Mac web browser!

Anyone else had this infuriating Word behavor? Any solutions to
suggest?

 

[stedman]

Oh, if it helps any... I'm using OS 10.4.2 but it happened with earlier
versions, too.

Also, I tried turning OFF auto recover and allow fast saves... but that
hasn't solved this either.

This is most unstable release ever of Word.

AARRGGHH!!

 

[Corentin Cras-Méneur]

Oh, if it helps any... I'm using OS 10.4.2 but it happened with earlier
versions, too.

In the release notes of MacOS X 10.4.3 they mention a fix for an ATSUI
bug that was causing just that in Word and Excel 2004. Do you still have
the problem after you update to 10.4.3 ??


Corentin

 

[Elliott Roper]

On 11/4/05 5:55 AM, "(e-mail address removed)" wrote:

Re the freezes--not addressing because Corentin gave the best advice--but
just by the way, my version of Word 2004 is very stable, I'm not sure it's
ever quit on me in Panther.

Also, bet you'd be a happier camper with more memory. If 512MB is
recommended by Macworld magazine just to enjoy running OS X, 768MB is not
much for OS X and Word, which is memory-hungry, especially an OS X with
Spotlight.

I'm running 2004 in 768MB on a 12" PowerBook 1GHz. 10.4.3 Word seems to
be perfectly stable and quite reasonably quick too.

I often leave ten or so bloated applications running for days if not
weeks on end. Apart from Safari, which still seems to have the odd
memory leak, there is infrequent evidence of memory shortage. It would
be different if I were mashing up huge pictures in Photoshop or comping
10 layers of video in Final Cut Pro. Word is fine in 768.

 

[Elliott Roper]

Good to know. I went from 512MB to 4x that, so missed any intermediate
steps.

Does anyone have a sense of whether Tiger takes more memory to be snappy
than Panther? I've been wondering.

All I know is that Tiger is a bit snappier than Panther with constant
768. The latest 10.4.3 update smartened things up quite a bit.
Especially Safari. Takes hardly no time to hit refresh three times on
the MVP pages ;-)

Once you get your spotlight tamed, you get a most impressive search toy.
Remember that only the first 100KB or so of long Word docs get indexed
by spotlight. My workaround is to print huge things I search often to
PDF. Preview.app and spotlight are a *wicked* combination. It took
about 10 seconds to find all 56 instances of "Daiya" across all three
disks here, totalling about 250GB of used space. (mostly saved postings
with good advice in 'em and Clive's compliments to us both in Bend..)

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

Does anyone have a sense of whether Tiger takes more memory to be snappy

All I know is that Tiger is a bit snappier than Panther with constant
768. The latest 10.4.3 update smartened things up quite a bit.
Especially Safari. Takes hardly no time to hit refresh three times on
the MVP pages ;-)

Ah, thanks. I guess I'm too cynical--I figured when Apple upped the memory
in the default configuration just before releasing Tiger, it was because
Tiger needed more memory than Panther.

Daiya

(And we should probably let this somewhat off-topic thread go away...)

 

[stedman]

Glad others have been happy with and having stable experiences with
Word 2004. I've just been floored by how often it freezes--multiple
times a day, often on opening docs.

I'll try 10.4.3 once the dust has cleared on it. It's good to know
that it could stop these repeated crashes.

I certainly hope that it's not the case that more than 768 megs are
required... that would become an expensive proposition and I think I'd
be more inclined to make do with AppleWorks and Pages than spend $$ on
a new RAM chip and discard a 512mm module. Which would be a sacrifice.

Too bad there isn't some earnest young college or grad student who
would, over a weekend, update the support pages so that they'd work
directly in Safari. My frustration on that was that it seemed even
worse than before (used to only take 1 refresh, now multiple). I do
hope that every time anyone mentions the support pages they also put in
the "keep hitting the refresh button multiple times with Safari".

Thanks much for all the feedback. I'll go check out the latest
MacFixit probs with 10.4.3 to see if it's ready yet or not for prime
time!

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

I certainly hope that it's not the case that more than 768 megs are
required... that would become an expensive proposition and I think I'd
be more inclined to make do with AppleWorks and Pages than spend $$ on
a new RAM chip and discard a 512mm module. Which would be a sacrifice.

Feedback from many others has reached a consensus that 768MB is just fine,
and that I was just being a tad hyper-paranoid when I mentioned that.

 

[WJ Shack]

Whatever other problems 10.4.3 may cause (it has been flawless for me on
three Macs), it does seem to make Word 2004 11.2 much more stable. Ever
since 11.2, using Word has been an adventure. With 10.4.3 it has been rock
solid.

 

[stedman]

Well, I installed 10.4.3 about a week ago... it seems to have stopped
the freezing on opening docs... SO FAR!

But alas, today, it froze multiple times when trying to paste something
from Safari into a document. And that happened repeteadly. I've saved
the document afresh, and turned off the auto recover business, and am
back to allowing Fast Saves. Maybe that will fix this, finally!

Say, back to the trouble-shooting pages... given that there are only a
few of those, couldn't that be the place for an earnest volunteering
web master to work first? Or, alternatively, permitting someone to
mirror those pages--who would fix them to display in Safari right off
the bat?

 

[Elliott Roper]

Well, I installed 10.4.3 about a week ago... it seems to have stopped
the freezing on opening docs... SO FAR!

But alas, today, it froze multiple times when trying to paste something
from Safari into a document. And that happened repeteadly. I've saved
the document afresh, and turned off the auto recover business, and am
back to allowing Fast Saves. Maybe that will fix this, finally!

Well, Good luck. Received wisdom is you should do the opposite;
autorecover, no fast saves.

Say, back to the trouble-shooting pages... given that there are only a
few of those, couldn't that be the place for an earnest volunteering
web master to work first? Or, alternatively, permitting someone to
mirror those pages--who would fix them to display in Safari right off
the bat?

That's been done to death. There is a shortage. Hit refresh and think
of England. (That's a euphemism for lie back and enjoy it.)
Safari is so quick in 10.4.3 you hardly notice.

 

[stedman]

Actually, i was responding to received wisdom in this group (!) and
elsewhere to turn off auto-recovery because many had found that was
part of the problem! It's not?

What's been done to death?

Unfortunately, I think of England, then Tony Blair, and then... and
it takes multiple refreshes now, not just one, to get those pages to
display (and in a few cases, they never show up!). So that gives me
time to think of Thatcher, the Malvinas, Iraq, Bush, etc.
(Fortunately, then I go to pleasant reflections about Scotland and
Monarch of the Glen...)

 

[Elliott Roper]

Actually, i was responding to received wisdom in this group (!) and
elsewhere to turn off auto-recovery because many had found that was
part of the problem! It's not?

I'm pretty sure fast saves is the evil one. I have left autorecover at
the default 10 minutes for the last few years and it has not bitten me
yet. Once or twice it has gotten me out of the brown stuff.

What's been done to death?

Asking 'em to fix the mvp site to make it Safari compatible.
The standard answer is "if you don't like it, fix it yourself". That
has been enough to make me crawl back into my shell. How about you?

Unfortunately, I think of England, then Tony Blair, and then... and
it takes multiple refreshes now, not just one, to get those pages to
display (and in a few cases, they never show up!). So that gives me
time to think of Thatcher, the Malvinas, Iraq, Bush, etc.
(Fortunately, then I go to pleasant reflections about Scotland and
Monarch of the Glen...)

Heh! from this and your other post about the bleedin' decorations you
are going to fit right in here.
I saw your .edu address and mistakenly thought I should explain things
'England' carefully. Abu Ghraib *has* added a new shade of meaning, as
you obliquely point out.

That stupid clipboard gives me the screaming ab-dabs. The shortcut for
paste is now cmd-V<any key> delete. grrrrr!! If this is the beginning
of the Word 12 context aware tools, I'm going to fight it every inch of
the way. It is completely stupid to have a thing like that block your
view of your work, especially when you already have a keystroke to do
everything that stupid dropdown wants to suggest you might want to do
about one time in 10,000.

The little blue arrow "nyah nyah you just made a typo and I fixed if
for you" is only a minor annoyance. It would be even more minor if I
did not make typos, but I see it all the time. It is quite decent for
fixing the slow paw on the shift key errors, but I wish it would do so
without crowing about it.