Excel just hangs but PC fine...

osaddictosaddict London, UK
edited July 2010 in Science & Tech
A colleague's Excel regularly hangs when doing routine/light work in Excel - copying data of around 500 rows and a few columns - so the stuff it should really do in the blink of an eye.

It basically just freezes then if you click the taksbar icon for that file it does nothing.

At this time both the CPU usage and memory usage are low. The machine has 3GB of RAM, when I killed Excel in task manager it was using ~ 400mb.

This has happened on many occasions and with different files, not just one suspect file.

Does anyone have any ideas? - Other than that I was going to try an office repair using the disc?

Comments

  • primesuspectprimesuspect Beepin n' Boopin Detroit, MI Icrontian
    edited July 2010
    Is it an already existing file, or something that he creates new each time? it may be a corrupt file, or the file may be sitting on a bad sector of the hard drive. Try creating a new excel file and copy/pasting the content into it, and if it still crashes, try running a disk check.
  • osaddictosaddict London, UK
    edited July 2010
    primesuspect wrote:
    Is it an already existing file, or something that he creates new each time? it may be a corrupt file, or the file may be sitting on a bad sector of the hard drive. Try creating a new excel file and copy/pasting the content into it, and if it still crashes, try running a disk check.

    It's intermittent and occurs with multiple different files, not one specific file. He said it's more often with larger data sets, which I can semi understand (that's often just being patient, but not in this case).

    I've told him how to run Excel in Safe Mode and also (bizarrely) to change his default printer to something else - Mr Excel forums suggested this could help, but I am heavily sceptical!

    If it was something hardware related (dodgy RAM or disc errors) presumably this would show up elsewhere too, not just Excel and would result in OS level freezes and blue screens?

    I guess at any rate a run through of Prime95, Memtest 86 and Sea Tools on a rainy day wouldn't do any harm.

    I also have him running the office diagnostics right now too.
  • primesuspectprimesuspect Beepin n' Boopin Detroit, MI Icrontian
    edited July 2010
    I guess reinstalling office might be a good thing then; also, make sure it's up-to-date. Weird problem :wtf:
  • osaddictosaddict London, UK
    edited July 2010
    primesuspect wrote:
    I guess reinstalling office might be a good thing then; also, make sure it's up-to-date. Weird problem :wtf:

    Yeah, it's a bitch that's for sure. Made even more strange that we have a bunch (read 40+) PCs of near on if not identical spec and with office installed in the same way, which appear to be fine.

    That may be my only option to try. Intermittent side of things makes it even wierder too :(
  • AnnesAnnes Tripped Up by Libidos and Hubris Alexandria, VA Icrontian
    edited July 2010
    Try re-creating his Windows profile. That's the only thing that fixes the "Office keeps crashing when you open it" problem here.
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