Weird MS Word Problem

Hi all,

maybe you can help me with a strage issue that surfaced just now.

When I´m reading large (> 2MB so far) .doc files in Word on my laptop, it just shuts down after a while. Without warning, without anything.
I had the strong suspicion it might be because the laptop has an overheating problem, but then again, I´ve had it running for hours while watching movies or surfing or whatever, and it never just switched off - so far. Can it be that Word indeed is responsible or could there be another issue?

I´d be grateful for any suggestion whatsoever.

The usual suspects for a heat shutdown are the processor, the hard drive, and (if your laptop has one) the video card. Watching movies or browsing the web put far more strain on your computer than a Microsoft Word Document. I think it's safe to rule out heat death.

This may sound funny....is your laptop falling asleep, i.e. going into suspend mode?
If you don't do anything at your machine, how long does it take before it shuts itself down?

I can rule suspend mode out because a) I may not write, but I scroll the text I read, and therefore provide input; and b) it´s disabled, I did that myself and I checked again.
I can also rule out an empty battery, since it´s plugged in.

Nevertheless, thank you for taking the trouble to reply.

I think you are having a problem with the Spell Check function. It will shutdown Word because there is a problem with it.

Please confirm.

I can see why spellcheck might have problems, but why would it switch off the laptop entirely?

I´m more and more convinced that it´s somehow a hardware problem, the laptop is over five years old now, but I can´t pin it down.