Microsoft Word / Endnote slowdowns

[skaertus]

I am currently writing my PhD thesis in Microsoft Word 2010, using Endnote X4 as a reference manager, under Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit. I am using a quite fast laptop to do the task, a Core i7-2720QM with 8 GB RAM. My thesis currently has 200+ pages, 90,000+ words, 1,300+ footnotes. There are 300+ references in my Endnote database and 1,000+ citations in the Word document (all in footnotes).

About two or three days ago, Word started to get real slow and sluggish to perform any task while I was writing the thesis. It is really painful and takes a lot of time to insert a footnote or a citation. Even if I turn cite-while-you-write off and unformat all Endnote citations in the document, it is still very slow and sluggish. Strangely, memory and processor usage seems to be low while the software is struggling to get the tasks done.

I am certainly not going to finish the thesis at this pace. Am I doing something wron? Do you have any ideas on what to do to make it faster?

By the way, is there any word processor / reference manager solution that is adequate for writing such long and complex documents without getting sluggish? I thought Word would be a good solution, as it seems to be fast and use a low memory footprint (at least when working with short documents). And I also read that Endnote was much faster than Zotero, for instance, for most tasks. What should I use next time? I just can't afford to see the software I use getting so many slowdowns when I am at a so much advanced state that I am unable to change it.

 

[Ken g6]

Are your laptop's vents getting enough air? Are they clogged with dust? The CPU could be overheating and throttling to protect itself.

As for other software that does endnotes...MediaWiki? (That's the software Wikipedia uses.) (La)TeX?

 

[skaertus]

Are your laptop's vents getting enough air? Are they clogged with dust? The CPU could be overheating and throttling to protect itself.

As for other software that does endnotes...MediaWiki? (That's the software Wikipedia uses.) (La)TeX?

Yes, the air vents are getting enough air, and the processor is not overheating.

I finally figured out how to solve the slugginess problem of Word. The problem was that Word was repaginating the document every time I added a new footnote and/or citation. The solution was to change to draft view (instead of layout) and to disable automatic repagination of documents. Word is much faster right now.

As for Endnote, it is still a slow beast, but it is manageable using it without cite-while-you-write enabled.

Anyway, thanks for your help.

As for another solutions, I will try something else next time. I find it unacceptable that Word and Endnote are so inadequate to handle such large and complex texts. I've tried LaTeX once, but I found it nearly impossible to learn. I am into human sciences, and LaTeX is a little bit odd for me. In addition, nobody in my field uses LaTeX; in fact, everybody uses Word, and I must keep compatibility with Microsoft Word files at any cost (even if I write in another word processor and then convert it to Word).

I may try OpenOffice / LibreOffice / WordPerfect or even Mac solutions such as Mellel / Nisus Writer Pro as word processors. Or Zotero / Mendeley / Biblioscape / JabRef / Bookends / Sente as reference managers. Or something like it. But not LaTeX... Any ideas?