System slow down

[Atherton Lamar]

I have a system "crawl". Office aps load impossibly slowly, about 3 sec from
keystroke to screen appearance in Word. Been on the help lines to Dell and to
Earthlink...several hours. Removed and replaced Office once. All agree it is
a system problem (not ISP chargeable). Downloaded spyware and ad screeners,
nothing profound.

What is going on...what should I do?

Tech details: a new Dell Dimension with Intel 2.8 ghz, 512K RAM, 80 mB HD,
Win XP Home, Office Student and Teacher Ed (Word, Excel, Ppoint, Olook). ISP
xnction via Earthlink DSL. System ran fine from October to mid-December.

 

[Paul Ballou]

Are just Office apps opening slow or is all programs?

Have you ran disk cleanup?

Have you tried defragmenting your system?

--
Paul Ballou
MVP Office
http://office.microsoft.com/clipart/default.aspx
http://office.microsoft.com/templates
http://office.microsoft.com/home

Control the things you can and Don't Worry about the things you can't
control.

 

[Atherton Lamar]

Appreciate the tips, but cleanup shows 0 MB to be gained and defrag shows 89%
free space and no need to defrag. I have checked for spyware with a
downloaded program (Spyware Doctor) and found some stuff but it doesn't
improve things. I am getting close to reloading Windows.

 

[Atherton Lamar]

Appreciate the tips, but cleanup shows 0 MB to be gained and defrag shows 89%
free space and no need to defrag. I have checked for spyware with a
downloaded program (Spyware Doctor) and found some stuff but it doesn't
improve things. I am getting close to reloading Windows.

 

[Atherton Lamar]

Oops sorry about the earlier post a few seconds ago. I wanted to close the
threads by posting the resolution of this issue. It turned out I had to run
"%appdata%" and then rename "normal.dot" to "oldnormal.dot". This was
posted as a fix for issues on Word 97 and is apparently still hanging aournd.

Anyway, Word 2000 Users beware.

thanks for all suggestions

 

[William Lipp]

This also worked for me. After a power failure casued abnormal
termination, my Office apps were EXTREMELY slow. Surprisingly, my
normal.dot was not in the directory %appdata%, but once I found and
renamed normal.dot, the applications resumed their normal speed.