How Big is Too Big?

[Jim]

I am a writer for several publications and I use Word 2002. I use XP Home
with 4 GIGS of RAM. I write about 3,000 words per day.

Lately, my Word program is loading slowly, opening new pages slowly, etc.
Otherwise, the PC runs great.

There are lots of problems and/or conditions that can cause this to happen.

Right now, my Word document file is holding over 1,000 documents, some of
which are from about 25 KB in size to over 20,000 KB.

90% of these are not actively used. And, others, for instance, the 20,000
KB docs, could broken up into several smaller files.

My question concerns this condition. Is the slowness caused by too many
documents, excessively large documents, neither or both?

Should I simply move the unused documents into storage on an external disk
or a folder designed for storage with easy access?

Or, is the slowness caused by something else all together.

Thank you in advance. After reading many of the posts here, I am truly
impressed by the wealth of knowledge among the MVP's. You are golden.

Jim in Texas

 

[JoAnn Paules]

I would back them up on a portable hard drive plus on a disk that I'd give
to a friend, stick in a fireproof safe, safe deposit box, whatever. If your
hard drive goes, you're not going to be a happy writer.

 

[Terry Farrell]

Unless you are running short of free disk space, the number of documents you
have on your HDD is irrelevant to the performance of Word. More likely the
problem is something else such as a clogged temp folder (which should be
empty when all applications are closed), overloaded normal.dot or
overzealous AV. Test Word by starting is Safe Mode to see if it is faster.
From Start, Run, type in

winword /a

and press enter. Test Word now to see if it is any better.