I have a Dell laptop with a 2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo and 2GB of memory. I sometimes have five or six large Excel spreadsheets open simultaneously, and my machine is painfully slow when loading or saving data. If I have to start from scratch with a completely new machine, what sort of specification should I be looking for?
Christopher Evans-Tipping
With a lot of large spreadsheets loaded, you may well have run out of physical memory. To find out, run the Windows Task Manager and click the Performance tab. This will tell you how much physical memory your PC has, and how much is still available. The tab for Processes will also tell you how much each program is using (on my PC, an empty copy of Excel 2007 uses less than 25MB.) You may be able to improve performance by closing down background programs, or adding another gigabyte of memory. Switching to a 64-bit version of Vista SP1 with 4GB will provide a much bigger improvement.
To keep some physical memory free, Windows finds data that you're not using and saves it to a large scratchpad on the hard drive (pagefile.sys), so you should also check the amount of free hard-drive space. You should always have at least 1GB free, and preferably 5GB. Windows' performance falls dramatically when you start to run out of resources (cured by a restart) or hard drive space.
If you don't see an improvement, disconnect from the net and turn off all your anti-virus software and any other background programs you don't need. If something is checking for viruses as you load and save large Excel files, it's certainly going to slow you down.
