On 6-Dec-2007, ?B?SmltIFRob21saW5zb24=?=
wrote:

I'm having trouble with a spreadsheet that has 32,000 rows and 120
columns
(Excel takes forever to do anything, I get frequent "low memory"
warnings,
etc). I'm currently using Excel 2003. I cannot break this spreadsheet
into pieces - it has to be combined in one sheet.
Built a Vista 64bit Ultimate with 512MB DDR2 to get it up and
running. Everything ran hot, the processor flat out, swapping
stuff to and from the HD cache, massive page faulting, no
heatsinks on the memory so that was probably running hot,
PSU running hot, as was HD with the pagefile being continously
accessed.
Large Office2007 Excel spreadsheet macros ran like a dog, even
with a 3.08GHz processor.
Swapped in 4GB Crucial 555 DDR2 no more page faults to
speak of, macros much faster. Check the file size of your
saved Excel file, and relate that to the amount of RAM you have.
If you need greater performance then there a mobos. that
support more than 4GB RAM, and have memory mapping
so that you can use 8GB or more of RAM.
Apart from that we have to wait until MS get round to
a 64bit version of Office, which I'm surprised they didn't
offer for XP 64bit, prior to Vista launch.
I'm about to ditch Vista as posts seem to suggest that
XP 64bit is much faster than Vista 64bit, and not such a
pain in the butt as Vista.