Excel 2002 pauses/freezes constantly

[Rick Bedard]

I installed Excel 2002 on a new Dell Latitude D800 Laptop with a 1.7Ghz
Intel Centrino chip and 512MB RAM. It is free-standing (not connected to a
network) and I have almost 60 gigs of free hard drive space.
When I am working with spreadsheets Excel freezes for about 15 seconds every
minute or two, especially if I am scrolling down pages and every time I
boldface text. This sometimes occurs several times per minute. For example,
if I boldface something it freezes for about 15 seconds but the next items I
boldface are instant. It's almost like it is backing up or writing to the
hard drive, but the hard drive light does not show it is being written to.
The freezing happens far too often and I cannot figure out why. I have never
had this problem with this same program on other computers. In an attempt to
fix this I installed service packs 1 and 2 but this did not fix the problem.
The program never actually crashes, it just temporarily freezes.

I have a feeling Excel is not being allowed the memory resources it needs.
Can this be adjusted?

Any ideas or suggestions would greatly be appreciated!

 

[BrianB]

Not a lot of experience with this but I found that my 2+ gigahertz
system works a lot better with all the fancy display options switched
off. I think that there might be options in Excel (etc) that adjust
menus to display the most recently used items and omit others. Excel
has always done this sort of thing on a smaller scale to save memory -
ie. not loading some things into memory until they are used the first
time.

In your place I would go through all the options (Windows System,
Office, and Excel) and switch off anything that is an "added feature"
and will therefore require system resources to run.

In a big worksheet set calculation to Manual.

Regards
BrianB
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