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Office 2000 Freezes

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11 replies

by mteal

Closed to new repliesThis discussion is closed. It stays readable, but it takes no new replies.

This is probably a common compalint - the computer freezes 'randomly'.

The user in question received a new IBM Laptop last Monday with Windows 2000 and Office 2000 as part of a new SOE.

Since Monday, she has had four occasions where windows has frozen. Ctrl-Alt-Del doesn't get a response, neither does toggling the Caps Lock key. The only solution is to reboot the machine.

On each of these four occasions, the user has been in either Word or Excel. On all of the occasions, the same three programs were open - Outlook 2000, Word 2000 and Excel 2000. The files being worked on have twice been local, and the other two times have been stored on the network.

Re-imaging the machine is not really a viable option at this stage, so any other suggestions would be appreciated.

11 replies

by mteal

I should also point out that it is Office 2000 SR-1A. This is part of the SOE.

by mteal

Thanks for the suggestion. Find Fast wasn't installed by default. The icon wasn't in the startup folder. I also checked the registry to look at what tasks run at startup and it wasn't there.

by hiltont

Hi,

I see that Office 2000 SR-1A is installed, but you say nothing about the Patch Level of Windows 2000. I'd suggest installing Windows 2000 SP1 on this machine (even if it is already installed) and then trying windowsupdate.microsoft.com and downloading/installing all Critical and relevant Recommended updates.

After this, I'd go to officeupdate.microsoft.com and do the same. Leave the "Email patch" alone unless you wish to reduce the functionality of Outlook below that of the worst freemail client. This patch SUX.

Reapply Win2k SP1 and see how it goes.

Regards,
Hilton

by mteal

Thank you for your suggestions.

The build was Windows 2000 SP1. I did reapply the patch (from an "official" MS CD).

I downloded the critical and recommended updates (about 3 in total).

There were no recommended updated for Office apart from the Outlook attachment update wich, as you suggested, I left alone.

Unfortunately the prblem continues.

by rockyolson

With out knowing how much ram you have on board I might suggest at least 128 mgs. without this much you are over taxing you cpu.

by mteal

Thank you for your suggestion. I am slowly learning what information I should inclue in my problem descriptions.

The machine has a PIII 800 processor and 256 MB of SDRAM.

by trifinc

System freezing can be caused by many different factors, such as, amount of memory, type of programs being run, number of programs being run at the same time, registry problems or hardware problems. You may want to remove any extra hardware (especially NIC cards)and see if that would solve the problem. Reboot in safemode, check hardware in device manager. If not, remove any extra programs from the Startup Group, and/or periodically check what processes are running in the background and how muchcpu time each is utilizing. You may also want to run a Disk Defrag on a regular basis. Especially, check APM and the BIOS settings. It would be advisable to run diagnostics to see if there are any hardware problems. Diagnostics are either found on the BIOS.

by mteal

Thank you for your sggestions. These sounds fairly thorough and it sounds like a useful process of elimination.

In this case it didn't resolve my problem. However, the user "bit the bullet" and asked me to reimage the machine. So far she has had a day with no freezes so far and that's a good sign.

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