You Have Exceeded Maximum Pages for Word

January 9, 2008

Ever wonder how many pages it would take to print out the Registry in Windows XP? Really? Me too.

Well, today I was talking to a customer while making some registry changes, and the topic of just how big the registry is came up. After hours I decided to export the registry of my corporate Windows XP SP2 desktop machine to a TXT file (139 MB).  Then I tried to open that registry.txt file with Microsoft Word 2007.  The result?

How many pages is that? 

32,767 pages of plain text, and it died.

Just for giggles, I decided to try and open the same 139 MB TXT file in the PortableApps version of OpenOffice.org Writer running on a USB flash drive. 

The result?

Windows XP was not amused.

But you know what? Writer actually got further than Word: 

38,306 pages. Actually, it was 38,307 pages, but when I tried to change the  3/4" margins to 1" margins to see if it would increase the number of pages, it dropped down to 38,306 and threw the fault error in the status bar.

So, if a page is 11" long / 63,360 inches in a mile = 5,750 pages per mile.
Basically, we’re at 6.6 miles long, and that’s not even the complete registry.

Update: I actually got OpenOffice Writer to reach 39,721 pages before it ran out of virtual memory. Anyway, enough fun for now.

Posted in SBS