My computer had been fine, until the last few days. Now whenever I save an excel file [ok, they are a bit large], it doesn't quickly save & return. There is a very long lag, everything freezes, and worse, sometimes most of the spreadsheet turns black until it eventually returns.

Is this a dying ram issue? Dying hard drive? Something else?
The only change has been running Cisco VPN to tunnel into work while my office is unusable.



The specs on my old comp:
Win XP Pro, sp2
only 512 mb ram
Athlon xp 1.3 ghz cpu
I think this has that shaky Western Digital 1200 Hard Drive.


Help, please....what may be wrong?



TIA

Does it exhibit the same behavior currently if you kill your VPN connection? Remove that known change from the equation first.

What JDMar said. Check the last change first.
(Actually, make backups first. THEN check the last change)

Where does the file actually reside? Is it on your local hard drive or on a system accessed via the VPN? If it's a very large file it could be taking a long time to save over the VPN. If this is the case I would download the file, work on it locally, save it and upload it to the system it needs to reside on. I don't know what type of broadband service you have or what your download/upload speeds are, but keep in mind that typical download speeds are from 3Mbps-6Mbps where typical upload speeds are 300kbps-700kbps.

If it's already a file saved locally on your hard drive try defragmenting the system and see if that helps.

By the way, what's the size of the excel file?

As backups, I've got copies of the file on my C drive [my home computer], the 'C' hard drive on my office comp and 2 drives that reside on the servers at work.

I've currently got DSL [768 kbps] which was supposed to have been upgraded to the 3Mbps [but I haven't been able to detect an increase in speed]. FIOS isn't available. The remaining option is cable; comcast said they couldn't guarantee an internet connection.

The file has been trimmed down to 2300 kb.


I realize that 512 isn't much memory. The price of older DDR333 sticks have risen so much that its almost cheaper to buy a new computer than spend over $120 increasing the ram to 2G.

One of the first thing that came to mind, except how does one accomplish the task in XP. Check your DSL speed either at http://www.dslreports.com/ or http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/ The former has other tests to tweak your broadband, while the latter offer a choice of servers.

to defrag in XP, open My Computer, then right click on the hard drive © and pick properties. Then on the Tools tab, there's a Defrag Now button.

I am getting the same feeling like Alan. Given this is via a VPN and you mentioned large excel files (I'm guessing at least a few megs). What happens when you open a file is that it's cached in your memory. When you call save, it overwrites the existing file by flushing it out from the memory. So every time you try to save, it's uploading that few MB file which even a good broadband connection can take upto a minute.

As others have suggested, there are several work arounds:
* Create a local copy, then upload when you're done.
* Instead of running Excel on your local machine, you can remote (VNC, Remote Desktop, etc) into the box that has the file and use Excel from that machine. That way only display information is sent and not the actual file.

Thanks

Nearly two years up and running, only 5 files out of >50,000 required fixing. The good old days, a monthly defrag would be a royal PIA.

After two years only 5 fragmented files? Now, I've seen some strange things, but this I've never seen, unless there's a program running that does maintenance on a regular schedule.

Defragging helped a tiny bit. I'm hoping more memory & a faster connection will help. If it doesn't, time to ask the boss for new, faster computer.