My old computer ran on Windows Vista and would open each word document as a separate instance. Now I have Windows 7 64 bit and this does not happen. I work on large text files, some of them over 10,000 pages long, and can have 4-5 documents open simultaneously.
In the past, when I would send one of them to the printer, the others would carry on working fine. Now, I have to wait for all the open documents to repaginate, and if I try to cancel repagination all word windows stop responding and I have been losing hours
of work. Any way to get 7 to work like Vista in this regard. I have aLenovo W530, Intel Core i7 3820QM @ 2.70GHz, 8.00GB Dual-Channel DDR3 @ 798MHz. I checked with resmon and CPU and mem are no where near being used up.
To force Word to open a new instance, include the /w switch in the command line (in the Run box or in a desktop shortcut). For information about command-line switches for Word, see
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=210565.
To make this easier to work with, use Windows Explorer to go to the folder C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office14, right-click the Winword.exe file, and choose Send To > Desktop (as shortcut). Then right-click the new shortcut and click Properties.
In the Target box, add a space and /w at the end of the path (after the closing quotes).
Double-clicking this shortcut will open a new instance of Word with a blank document, while dragging the icon of a document file and dropping it on the new shortcut will open a new instance and open the document. The Task Manager confirms that each of these
is a separate instance of the Winword.exe process.
