winword is using a grotesque ammount of memory

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ive googled and googled for solutions, but i simply cannot understand wth people are talking about, plus 90% of people seem to have a _similar_ but different problem, email related problems, etc.

i am just worried that whenever i open word (which i do often, cus i write) it uses memory so badly, im afraid ill fry my computer (again) which i cant afford.

i know its a windows problem (and not a trojan or whatever... ), cus i see other people complaining, but as i said... i cant make anything out of those sites and their explanations

anybody know what i can do?
i tried deleting a template file, but it still eats up everything i got of memory when i open it again.

How much memory do you have? as was just discussed in another thread, if your using vista you need a min. 3 gigs of memory before it will start to run 'fast'. Sure you can have it going good on a low spec. PC, but dont expect it to go fast. I have vista on my mothers pc with 512mb of memory and a old P4 cpu, runs fine for her surfing the web and card games.
One way you can get it going faster is to turn off all the "fancy looks". Sure it will look like windows 95, but it will go faster. Another thing is to turn off all services that are not needed, disable all program startups that are not needed.
Look at the task manager before starting wordpad to see how much memory is being used, and then look after you start word to see how much it is using. If I know the before and after and how much memory your system has, and how many processes are runing, might be able to tell you what is going on.

You cannot fry your computer from excessive memory usage.

This can be also happen with OpenOffice (and some browsers, namely and shamely Firefox) under Linux. My experience is that this happens if they are to long open (>24 hours). A similar problem is well known for the Acroreader under Linux, when the ld-linux allocates more and more heap (I saw in the extent of 2GB).

My advice: Close such applications at least ones a day.

i am using win XP, from 2002. old. didnt notice untill now tho, cus i havent written a lot.

roadracer; my computer runs like a roadrunner, i have long since shut off everything i dont need, everything is humming at an absolute minimum. winword just eats up everything seemingly by itself.

Then that sounds like a memory leak with word. Look in task manager to see after you close it if the proces is actually stoped, and also that there is only one proces going. Try google for word memory leak. Unfortnantly, it is not a easy fix, because it is usually caused by installing something like a update, or a prgram that caused a error in windows, that is leading to the memory leak in word. If you installed something, then this started happening then that might be what caused it, but chances are that uninstalling what caused this will not fix it. It is a long shot, but try using a program like CCleaner to clean the registry of errors. If you cant find any fixes online, and cleaning the registry does not help, then it would probably be better to just switch to a differnt program. I use openoffice also, great program.

If all else fails, you can use the much more compact AbiWord.
http://www.abisource.com/
I used it for some time before I switched over to Open Office, but it is rather nice for the job it does. Also, the inquiry continues.
How much RAM do you have, and how much swap file/ page file do you have reserved. My computer, only 256 MB RAM runs smoothly with its...382 MB page file, smaller than I thought. Have you attempted to modify the performance settings in the advanced system settings tab of the system settings? Some of those flashy effects may hinder your performance. The Edition of your XP version may also greatly effect the system performance. That happens to be one of the reasons I happen to be using Professional, Home Edition is a bit messy.