I think the title pretty much says it all. After opening my control panel and ranking my apps by size, I just learned that good ol’ MS Word 2002 is a skosh over 4 GB in size. Yes, that’s 4 gigabytes. Yes, MS Word, not Works.
I’ve heard of bloatware, but this is ridiculous. What the devil is going on here? My next largest app.–MS Office–is 180 MB, about 25 times smaller. When I click for more information, a notation reads: “Windows estimates the amount of room a program (folder and subfolders) occupies. This is only an estimate and can sometimes be incorrect.”
Yes, I know how to read correctly. Yes, I actually have MS Works on my notebook.
Where, oh where would I look in my C directory to review the contents of this monster folder? Do I go to Program Files or Windoze? What next?
P.S. Any reason to retain Java 2 Runtime Environment, at 136 MB? I mainly run Word, Excel, and Outlook. Some CDs/DVDs and Internet financial pages. That’s it. No 4-D interactive porn or global weather simulations.
That sounds like some sort of disk problem (mis-reporting the size). Have you run Scandisk or similar to check this out? BTW, my largest App is MS Office XP at 469 MB.
Windows just adds up the sizes of the folders containing the program. If there’s other things there, it will report that too. For example, I had a piece of video editting software that had a “Projects” folder under it’s main program folder. I saved some in-progress videos there. Add/Remove Programs reported the size as 17GB for that program. Check your Program Files.
What version of Windows are you using? Win2K has the annoying habit of spontainiously spewing out temp files that it forgets to delete. These things can eventually swallow your entire harddrive. If you’re on 2K, that’d be the first thing I’d suspect.
I think it may just be Control Panel that’s screwed up. I’ve had this happen to me before; some programs just give a completely erroneous size on the Add/Remove Programs list. I’ve checked the directories and they’re not really that size.
Go ahead and check for weirdness as described by others above, but if you don’t find anything amiss, don’t worry about it.
It’s possible that, if your Word install is a “full install,” it may include an on-disk installation of all the graphics libraries that Word/Office comes with. There’s usually an option to run these libraries from the CD, but if you (or whoever installed Word) elected to run them from the hard drive, they can take up a pretty big chunk of space. I’d still say 4GB is pushing the bounds of credibility, though, and definitely look for some other source of bloat.
For comparison, I have Microsoft Office XP Pro with Frontpage installed on my Windows XP workstation. The total size of the application directory is a little over half a gig. That includes Word, Access, Excel, Frontpage, PowerPoint, and Outlook.
I wouldn’t be surprised if you had about 3.5GB of Word files or temp files like Tuckerfan suggested. It may even be including your whole “My Documents” folder in that total.
I had an app on my machine that was probably a meg or so installed, but it was a cough downloading…type…program cough and the total size in Add/Remove programs definitely included the folder in which i stored files downloaded by this app. The folder was within the app’s Program Files/appname/ folder.
I don’t know about the latest versions of Word, but as of a few years ago it was still very poorly housebroken, leaving droppings all over the place. Every so often I search my drive for old Word temp files and find many megabytes of them.