My wife is using my old Sony Vaio laptop. She said that everytime it saves, it will not work. She will save the file (word and excel) and then close it. She will go back into the file and it will not have updated. This has happened twice over the past week. The files that she is updating is her homework that was all saved prior to this problem. She is pretty good with computers, so I doubt it is a user error. Any ideas?

PII 400 mhz
Win XP Pro
Office XP

 

I know it might sound dumb, but is she saving the files to the same directory location? Overwriting the existing file? Try doing a search for the file name and see if there are multiple copies. Also try and save the file with a different file name and see if that works.

 

She is saving it under the same file name, and over writing it. I have done a search for all .doc and any word that was in the file. I was not able to find anything!

 

Check the file properties (Right click the file) Maybe its set to read-only.

 

I just had her check and it is not on "read only"

This is really confusing me!

 

Try re-installing Office. If that doesn't work, your HD might be going out. I would recommend backing everything up to a CD or floppy or whatever ASAP. Can you save other work?

 

I haven't tried saving other applications yet. I was thinking of reformatting the entire drive and re-installing everything...

 

Yea, it sounds like re-format time.

 

is she connected to the internet on it? if so have she ran a virus scan?...some virus are made just to annoy....at an office a virus that wont allow anyone to save would be an extremely serious problem....

 

Nope she uses it in the bedroom, so it hasn't been connected to my network for a few months. I will update the virus scan today and see if that works before I reformat. Thanks!

 

Like Brad asked, can she save to a different filename?

If that works, and if the virus scan doesn't turn up anything, it sounds like you may have one or more cross-linked files, or an error in the FAT/VTOC.

Try this..

• Open My Computer
• Find the drive (C?), and RIGHT_CLICK on it
• Click on PROPERTIES
• Click on TOOLS
• Click on CHECK NOW
• Click on AUTOMATICALLY FIX
• Click on START
  
  If you get a dialog asking to do this at next reboot then:
• Click YES
• Shutdown and reboot the machine

Either way, this process will start a CHKDSK. When it gets done, see if you can save over the top of that file.

 

Thanks Mark!
I will try that when I get home!

 

Ok I got working on my laptop and it was running horrible. So I bought some seafoam and... Whoops I mean I got to researching it and noticed that it only had 500mb of free space left on the HD. I deleted my old school stuff off of the computer and ran the disk cleanup. I was able to get 1.19 GB of free space back. I downloaded the updates for Mcafee and updated XP. I then rebooted and ran the defrag and it looked horrible! When it was done defraging it had 1.4GB of free space left (only has a 6 gb HD)

After the defrag, I ran the virus scan and it came up with no virus'. I did what Mark recommended.

So after doing all of this, the computer is running a lot faster. I tried to save and it worked. I talked to my wife (she was out of town) and she said that it was not saving when she was converting from .doc to adobe. I haven't tried this yet. But at least it runs better.
THanks for your help guys!

 

Oh... is this a new symptom or a clarification of the original one?

If she's trying to save as a PDF, then maybe this is an issue with the install of the convertor; or, is the document also open somewhere else in a viewer? I think Acrobate Reader opens documents in shared read-only mode, which means that any other application can open the document for reading ("shared"), but no one can open it for write or update ("read-only"). That would certainly create the symptom of not being able to save the doc to a PDF over the top of itself.

As an aside... given that's she's updating homework, it might be a better idea in general to save the doc in "revisions", like: MyHomework_001, MyHomework_002, MyHomework_003, etc... That would give her an ongoing backup of her work, as well as getting around this issue.


On other fronts, glad to hear your machine's working better!

 

Here is another tip to gain back some HD space.

Go to your Acc. folder on the Start button, then System Tools.
Run the Disc Cleanup, but before telling it to delete the stuff it scans and finds, click on the advanced tab in there.

Scroll down to the bottom of it and click on System Restore to get rid of old saved restore points.

These can often take up a few GB of space.