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jao
Asked: 2010-04-14 09:13:38 +0800 CST

Office 2007 running under Windows 7 is slow to save files to network

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Saving an Excel or Word 2007 file to a network share is very slow in Office 2007. It might take as long as two minutes two save a 100kb file. What could be causing this?

The network share is hosted on a Windows 2003 server.

performance windows-7 microsoft-office-2007

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    I am going to assume your network connection is just fine, and you are local to the server (i.e not VPN'ing in). You didn't specify whether this was just yourself, or everybody having the issue, however that is pretty irrelevant to my answer.

    I've seen Office hang for a while on save and/or print dialog boxes when you have either a network printer which is no longer in service, or mapped network drives pointing to non-existent/unavailable servers.

    Is it just Office which is slow to save, or any application? Try opening Notepad and attempting to save to the same file server. Also, when doing a \\SERVERNAME, can you browse the share(s) relatively quickly?

    If you have physical access to the server or can RDP to it, fire up Task Manager and check you've not got something eating away all of the CPU. While you're in Task Manager, check the memory usage isn't excessive too.

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  2. This worked for me when office was slow to launch and save:

    Make the default printer Adobe PDF or a locally attached printer instead of a network printer.

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  3. I did some research and this is what I found on different forums:

    There are two possibilities:

    1. slow Office save times to Windows Server 2008

    Vitaly suggested to disable SMB2 on the server that holds the share. To do so add a REG_DWORD entry named Smb2 with a value of 0 to: HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Parameters

    Then reboot the server.

    SMB2 is and updated version of SMB1 protocol. SMB2 is native to Server 2008 and Windows 7 and Vista. If any of your clients would be XP, OR your server would be W2K3, then SMB1 would be used instead and you would not have the problem you are experiencing right now. Disabling SMB2 on the W2K8 server forces Windows 7 to become backward compatible and switch to using SMB1. However, the problem you are experiencing is caused by MS Office 2007 is not working properly with SMB2 protocol. Since I am not a developer and I do not work for Microsoft I can not tell you why Office 2007 works this way with SMB2. For testing purposes, you can try to search for how to disable SMB2 on your Windows 7 client rather then disabling it on the server. This should provide same result. I know that disabling something may not be the prettiest solution but this is the only one that worked for this problem so far.

    1. slow Office save times to Windows Server 2003

    Clay Kimber suggested to try disabling indexing on the file locations where you are experiencing slow save times. Try disabling indexing of Offline Files if appropriate for your situation: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg985445(office.12).aspx

    James Nelson added to that: SMB2 doesn't exist in Windows Server 2003. The cause may be an offline files cache that was being indexed by Windows 7. Please disable indexing on the offline files cache.

    If you are seeing this with Windows 7 and Win 2003 file server with redirection in place, I have to suggest that the offline files cache on Windows 7 may be the issue. Have a look in your users' folders on the server and look for temp files. If you see a bunch of odd looking temp files with alpha-numeric characters in their names, run a test by disabling indexing on the user's offline files cache in Indexing Options in the Control Panel.

    Hope this helps.

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