Two month old MacBook freezes when saving

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blockster - 23 Nov 2006 02:18 GMT

Hi all-

My son has a two month old Macbook that runs Office 2004 for Students
and Teachers. When he is in his dorm connected to a printer documents
in Word can be saved or printed with no problems.

If he takes the computer to class--now disconnected from the printer,
sometimes when saving a word document the message "connecting to
printer" appears and the Macbook freezes--when restarted it saves with
no problem. Even when it does not freeze, when saving a document it
briefly flashes--"connecting to printer". Then it saves the document.

Has anyone seen this? Is there a fix? Any ideas?

Thanks for any help here.
Jim

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John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh] - 23 Nov 2006 12:43 GMT

Word will always try to connect with the most-recently used printer when
saving any document. If it can't find the most recently-used printer for a
document, it will connect to the default printer currently connected.

It shouldn't freeze when doing this: make sure you have the latest updates
applied for Mac OS X and Office 2004.

The only other thing you can do is disconnect the network before saving :-)

Cheers

On 23/11/06 1:18 PM, in article
1164248281.660052.187940@j44g2000cwa.googlegroups.com, "blockster"
<JBlock56@aol.com> wrote:

> Hi all-
>
[quoted text clipped - 12 lines]
> Thanks for any help here.
> Jim

Signature

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <john@mcghie.name>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Business Analyst, Consultant
Technical Writer.
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410

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blockster - 26 Nov 2006 03:48 GMT

Thanks John. I will tell him to try the updates to both the Apple OS
and to Office. Why does it try to connect to the printer unless it is
told to print?

Jim

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John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh] - 26 Nov 2006 08:25 GMT

Hi Jim:

The "printer" contains all the basic information Word needs to paginate the
document.

I've never bothered to dig out the full explanation (sorry: I'm lazy...).
But the following is part of it...

The font images to be used, the exact measures of those fonts, the paper to
be used and the exact measure of the print image: these all come from the
printer driver, and the only way to interrogate that is to "connect to the
printer". Chances are you would find that the printer device never actually
gets a signal: the message that appears really means "asking the Apple OS
Printing Subsystem for the Printer Definition File details..."

Word paginates and cleans out the deleted parts of the document when you
close. It then writes descriptive information from the printer into the
file header.

Hope this helps

On 26/11/06 2:48 PM, in article
1164512898.014737.143380@l12g2000cwl.googlegroups.com, "blockster"
<JBlock56@aol.com> wrote:

> Thanks John. I will tell him to try the updates to both the Apple OS
> and to Office. Why does it try to connect to the printer unless it is
> told to print?
>
> Jim

Signature

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Mac Forum / Applications / MS Office / November 2006

Two month old MacBook freezes when saving