Computer freezes when I start MS Word

[patio]

Excellent suggestions by soybean...this will also improve things.

As far as space is concerned i would consider adding another HDD to that machine as the pricing right now is pretty reasonable...

And or consider getting a DVD burner to store data...they can be had now from newegg for about 40 bucks shipped.

[SuperDave]

Defrag is set to run once a week. I'm going to try Ccleaner and suggest that she adds an extra HDD because the CD burner is an old one and will only burn to CD-R's. A new HDD to run her machine and the old one for backup storage. Thanks

[GX1_Man]

Just remember that ALL hard drives fail eventually, so if important data is important, just a hard drive is not the solution. 

[SuperDave]

The MS Word saga continues. She called me this morning to tell me that she can open Word, gets an error message and it closes. I found 3 normal.dot files; two which were created when she started having trouble and one when I tested it. Deleted the files and it running again. What's happening here? I tried Ccleaner and added 60 megs of free HDD space. The only thing that she has been doing differently is to save her mail messages as .txt file, bringing them into Word and converting them to .doc files.
Oh yes, GX1 Man, I was thinking about the problem of storage during my jog this morning and I've come to the conclusion there is no foolproof way to save your data. Disks, HDD and any other storage method are doomed to failure or obsolesence. All we can hope for is that the information is protected for as long as we need it.

[GX1_Man]

More than 1 location is best. A spare hard drive is good AND an optical drive backup. That's what I do. 

[SuperDave]

I have two HDD and I back up each one to the other therefore I'm protected if one fails. If both fail at the same time, I'm toast.

[Zylstra]

Could someone please explain exactly what the normal.dot file is?
Is it the default template or something?

[patio]

Repair install of Office

[soybean]

Could someone please explain exactly what the normal.dot file is?
Is it the default template or something?

Yes, it's the default template for new/blank Word documents.  Normal.dot Template—Explained

[Zylstra]

Could someone please explain exactly what the normal.dot file is?
Is it the default template or something?

Yes, it's the default template for new/blank Word documents.  Normal.dot Template—Explained

Huh
I didnt know that
Thanks for linking to it, Soybean

I have never had a problem requiring to do that before

[SuperDave]

Could someone please explain exactly what the normal.dot file is?
Is it the default template or something?

Yes, it's the default template for new/blank Word documents.  Normal.dot Template—Explained

Huh
I didnt know that
Thanks for linking to it, Soybean

I have never had a problem requiring to do that before

According to this link, the normal.dot file should not be deleted. Just change the extension. Everything else I read about this problem was telling me to delete the file so I guess the lesson here is not to believe everything you find on the net.

[patio]

When it's deleted it's automatically recreated on the next restart...

[soybean]

Yep, it can be deleted.  Just keep in mind that if you've customized any toolbars or gone into Tools, Options, and changed preferences from default settings, you'll lose those things when you delete Normal.dot and allow Word to create a new one.  I'm not sure about macros; you might lose them, too.