Microsoft Word Hangs
Have you ever noticed that Word (and the other Office programs) hang briefly at
odd intervals? If it happens when you're accessing the toolbar, you may want
to change your default printer.
What does THAT have to do with anything? Well, imagine you're moving the
mouse to the save icon.
Linger for just a moment over the printer icon. Office goes to check the
default printer. If that printer is on the network the check can take
several seconds. Network checks are NOT interruptible. So everything on the
system comes to a halt.
The problem is especially acute when connected wirelessly. The network
connection is programmed to be especially fault-tolerant. While that's great
for emails and file transfers, it means a lot of retries (and a lot of time
waiting for the network to time out!) if your printer is just turned off or
just happens to be set to your office printer even though you're not in the
office.
So if that is the problem, what's the solution? If you're a
shortcut key fan, you can just
remove the icon from the toolbar and use ctrl-P or ALT-F, P instead of the
icon. See our article on
customizing your toolbars if you're not sure how to remove the icon.
If you like the icon, you can move it somewhere out of the way so that
you don't run over it so often. You can also set your default printer to a
local printer or to a program like Adobe Acrobat or Microsoft Document Image
Writer. This kind of software writes an image file on the hard drive rather
than sending information to a physical device, so it doesn't suffer from the
same network timeout issues.
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