In other news, I made my way to Meriko's yesterday afternoon and she kindly installed a new copy of Word, which didn't have the 'crash when I use find' problem. Exciting! I thought all was well, but this morning, I opened up Word to make a minor change to my book, and when I moved to the end of the manuscript, it crashed in exactly the same way. It hasn't yet crashed when I use find, but I suspect it's only a matter of time. So my limited computer knowledge tells me that this isn't actually a problem with my copy of Word, right? Maybe a memory allocation issue? Something else? Which means I probably have to send my poor computer in again? Someone tell me if there's some other obvious solution I'm missing, please. It's a big pain, sending my computer in.
one thing we didn’t try: optimize your HD. There might be fragmentary sadness…
How do I do that? I have this vague feeling that I’ve done this at some point before, and that it just involves rebooting and holding down the correct keys, but I may just be making that up. I do that a lot with computer stuff. 🙂
It kind of sounds to me like you just plain need more memory. I don’t know how much memory you have, but installing new memory on Mac laptops is really really simple, and certainly not something you need to send it back in to Apple to do.
It could also be that the particular file you are working with is causing the problem – is it very large?
I would highly recommend backing it up – and/or saving it as a new file as a precaution.
You might then look and see if somehow towards the end of the file something “odd” has been happening – say lots of empty word tables or an embedded graphic or other object etc – that might be the cause of the problem – if a part of the file got corrupted in some manner, word might be crashing whenever something (like say find) tries to work with that section of the file).
Has it crashed with other files, or just the manuscript?
If you can, copy the manuscript file to another machine and see if it also crashes on that machine – that would be definite sign of a problem with the file.
hope this helps,
Shannon