computer speed for word processing

I know you are going to say this should not be an issue, but for me, oddly, it is. I am a professor and am scanning pages into Word to create notes for a new class I am teaching. (I actually scan to pdf and then get them coverted to Word by an online source). Word being a pain to begin with, messes with the margins (among other things), and I regularly have to reset the margins. I don't know if it is because of the margin hassles, but I notice that after a brief period working with a document, my computer slows down. It at times takes about 3 seconds for a letter I type to show up. Further, even typing outside of Word in an Outlook email slows down (though in both cases can speed back up again).

There seems to be less of a problem on my T 60 (though still an issue) than on my school computer, which has me wondering if a more powerful computer can deal with whatever is going on better than a less powerful one. I have kicked around the idea of buying a new computer, so this might provide an incentive.

Comments?

 

Hard drive and memory could be playing a role as well. What's your machine type?

 

It is a T 60, the school computer is a Dell, not sure which one. Not especially new.

 

Doesn't exactly narrow it down

If it is as slow as I think it is and it is running XP, this seems plausible.

 

There are several issues happening here on two computers. I will attempt to address them.

T60 & Lenovo machine type
Look on the bottom of your T60. There should be a sticker that tells you what the machine type is. We can then look up your machine type on lenovo.com to tell what the specs are.

Dell School Computer
Is your school computer, the Dell, owned by the university? If so just have their IT guys look at it. Mind you the in house IT capabilities vary from school to school.

Things that can slow down a computer
1. Lack of Ram. If you are using XP with 512MB Ram I recommend you upgrade to at least 1GB. This will help things speed up.

2. Other intensive sofware trying to carry out disk intensive tasks. This can be any software really. If you are workin on a very large word doc and attempt to open outlook it will operate slower than if you just had outlook open. Less obvious examples: Lenovo uses software called rescue and recovery that can be set to backup your system periodically. If it is doing a backup while you are trying to work on it everything will slow down. Your Dell may use something similar or the school may use their on software on that computer for backup.

3. Viruses & Malware. Are you using any antivirus softare? Keep in mind that if the antivirus software is trying to scan your computer things may slow down. Depends on what antivirus your using.

4. Word documents with lots of images in them. You mentioned that you are using PDF files that are then converted into word. If they are merely pasted into word as an image then it will take up more ram and may slow things down if their are enough of them. On the other hand, if the physical documents are scanned into pdf readable files, then you can copy and past the text from the pdf into word, this would take up less ram.

 

More ram and faster hdd can always help.

So basically you are using an online OCR to recognise words on the PDF documents??

School computers are always slower due to the virus scan systems they use, this is one reason why IT faculty runs 3 computers in each office.

Faster computer may not help you that much, if Microsoft Office decides to be a slow poke, it is one slow beast no matter how fast your processor, how large your ram is.

 

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20071114150331AAX1XHc
http://help.lockergnome.com/office/Word-2007-slow-load-documents--ftopict1002130.html

 

No images.


Thanks for the feedback.

 

So upgrading might make no difference? Currently I have T 60 with 2 gigs of ram and a 5400 HD.

 

Upgrading to a faster 7200RPM drive or SSD may help. If you're running the factory image from Lenovo with all the ThinkVantage tool that can slow things down. You may wish to turn off anything starting with Windows that you're not using.

 

Why don't you download process explorer and add cpu history to the stat columns. Check what caused the cpu spike during the lag. I don't if you read the links I posted but people complain the MS word lag is a known problem. For now try my advice before doing hardwares upgrade like everyone suggested.

Process explorer:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx

Did you install office 2007 SP2? Maybe the fix was part of it. What version are you using anyway? I assumed you're using 2007.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...18-79ea-46c6-8a81-9db49b4ab6e5&displaylang=en

 

It is still 2003 Word. Thanks for the feedback.

 

This may explain why your laptop slowed down so much with Office.

 

Really? Why?

 

Word 2003 seems to have trouble with really large word files, when you load too much images into the Word 2003 it bogs down really bad as compared to Word 2007. If you look at your CPU usage it should tell you how much CPU resources your large word documents take up.

 

Follow up: Going back and forth between my school computer (which probably has 512 mb - 1 gig of Ram, and my T 60, 2 gigs, the T 60 is better, so Ram seems to help. The fact that Word 2003 is clunkier, as noted by Lead Org, doubtless is also a factor.