Summary: Printing complex documents in Microsoft Word 2003 taking too much memory? One option is to turn off background printing.
Normally, Microsoft Word 2003 prints documents in the background. This means that as the document is being printed, you can continue editing or viewing the same or other documents. The downside to this feature is that printing may be slowed since your computer is multitasking, and more memory is required to handle this procedure.
If you are printing larger documents that need to be finished in a hurry, or if you have a computer with a low amount of memory that seems to drag whenever you print documents from within Word 2003, you can optionally turn this feature off.
1. Click “Tools” – “Options”.
2. When the “Options” multi-tabbed dialog box appears, click the “Print” tab.
3. Uncheck “Background printing”.
4. Click “OK” to close the dialog box.