I have a large 2003 Word document (200 pages) and when I edit it, it keeps shutting down. I tried to uninstall Word and then install it back, but that doesn't help. Any advice, please?

Try saving a copy of the document with a different file name in RTF (Rich Text Format). You can do this from the File menu > Save As > Save As Type.

If that doesn't help, delete the RTF and open up the original DOC version. Check your RAM usage in Task Manager (use [Ctrl] + [Alt] + [Del] and go to the Performance tab to get to this) whilst Word is open along with the other applications that you might normally have open at the same time. If you don't know whether the RAM usage looks good or bad, let us know the two figures that are reported for Commit Charge Total and Physical Memory Total.

Let us know the results and we'll advise further

Thanks for that advice. Here are the figures in the Task Manager:

Commit Charge

Total - 306728
Limit - 638608
Peak - 311696

Physical Memory

Total - 261104
Available - 45600
System Cache - 85384

You currently have 256MB RAM fitted inside your PC and Windows is trying to use about 300MB. You would get better performance by adding some more memory (RAM) into the PC but it doesn't look bad enough at the moment to be causing the problems with Word.

Did you try saving the document as an RTF file and seeing if that worked better?

Thanks again for your help. Yes I did save it as a Rich Text and the thing is that after I installed the latest Microsoft updates, that is, since yesterday, both the original word and the rich text document seem to be running well. I am still a bit sceptical, but for the time being there is no problem, could some Microsoft update have fixed up a bug in the Word?

That's good news. Yes, it's entirely possible that a Windows Update could have replaced a damaged shared file with a new working version ... or perhaps there was a problem with the way that your Windows installation was managing memory allocation or something and the update coincidentally resolved it.

I'll close the thread for now then. Let a moderator know if the problem comes back and we'll re-open the thread.

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Thread re-opened at request of thread starter.

Well, the problem has returned, but I think I have spotted some relevant information. Here how it goes. I haven't experienced the shutting down of my Word document for a while. Then it started again. I converted the file into RTF format, but that didn't help either. So I kept the task manager open while editing my Word document and I noticed that whenever I changed something in the text or even after highlighting some paragraphs the CPU usage jumped to 100%, and if I kept editing the file it simply closed down with the error message. I used to edit such big Word files (200 pages) before, so the problem seems to have started some months ago and I have no idea as to the reason: I ran adware removal programme, checked the disc for viruses as well (not to mention reinstalling the MS Office). So why does any change in a simple Word file take so much CPU? It shouldn't be 100% all the time I'm working with a Word file, right?

Still no suggestions? Please!!!