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It’s my wife’s co laptop, so I can’t do anything on it to fix. I’m just trying to give her the info to push to her IT for how to fix it.

She works with B I G spreadsheets and Excel has plugins to some sort of database. She works predominantly from home on VPN, grabbing files from their server. They have a Gigabyte connection to the internet and our connection at home is 45down10up

It’s a Probook G6 - i5-8265u processor with 8Gb ram (not sure on the SSD)

Teams is using upwards of 600Mb ram, Ram usage is >70% at rest (nothing other than Teams open) and she’s having issues opening multiple spreadsheets, excel hangs and is unresponsive for periods of time. CPU is also pretty heavily loaded, although I can’t log it, when excel hangs, it’s possible to get into task manager and CPU is at the top end use. So the system itself isn’t hanging, it seems to be excel.

Network usage is pretty much zero, so whilst I would have initially thought it was our connection that’s causing issues, it seems not. My next thought is that the laptop isn’t man enough for these spreadsheets. 8Gb ram is pretty much taken up by base load - simply upgrade to max (32Gb) should sort this out - I’m guessing it’s using the swap file which causes some delay. The processor isn’t the fastest in the world, but I’d expect it to peak when a request is put in. It needs a log over time of processor usage.

Any thoughts? Anything else to look at?

8 Spice ups
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You’re doing it right.

SSD is a must.

Excel is weird, when it comes to memory usage on large files; we’ve dealt with that. In short, it tries to achieve a balance of RAM vs cache usage, and it kinda has a mind of its own. Either way, more RAM is definitely the solution.

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If it’s pulling information in from another DB or other tables in another workbook it will take time to process, hence the CPU usage.

If she does not have Office 64bit and the files are as stated, huge, I would suggest this is the first option, but her IT will need to ensure it wont affect other apps she uses or needs.

It could be that if she is pulling data from a live ODBC connection the SQL tables are fragmented which Excel or her local device will not show.

Ram upgrade would be an initial thought too but if everyone gets a base system with standard build, this may have to be an exception - so I’d pass it back to her IT.

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Thanks both.

From what I’ve seen, the spreadsheet pulls in data on the press of the refresh button - a delay here is understandable. The delay isn’t happening on just those spreadsheets though. They are large workbooks (tens of mb) with a load of calculations, some of which have to be turned onto manual calc - again a delay during calc is understandable.

I’ll check the Office version - its O365 on Win10, I would’ve thought it would be 64bit, but worth a check.

We’re pushing for RAM upgrade - it’s around £100 to get 2x16Gb sticks which is the max it will take. It is a subsid of a large corporate, but being where she is, she should be able to push for an exception.

I’m of the view that a standard machine is great - for IT - but whilst most people will work within the specs, there will always be a few that need/want more - the art is in separating out the need from the want - having seen it, this is a need.

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Difficult for you to diagnose the problem when it needs a few non allowed experiments for you such as slipping in RAM from another laptop to try but perhaps the IT department will “play ball”. You can time the opening of documents, etc, so that you have some facts to back up her complaint, rather than say it’s slow. Concurrently opening large Excel spread sheets is going to use up her RAM and give her the performance hits she is getting. As well as pushing for the extra RAM could she ask for an old laptop from work which she can then dedicate to running Teams and that will reduce the laptop loading.

As an aside, RAM percentage usage may not accurately tell you that it is short of RAM as ideally the OS should use as much as it can of it but not use the hard drive for it as this utilises the RAM asset as much as possible.

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Managed to persuade the it dept to max out the ram - 8gb to 32gb. For the cost of dimms it’s not worth the bother of trying 16gb first.

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I agree with everyone regarding the RAM. Today 8Gb is like the bare starting point.

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Memory has been upgraded … it had 1 x 8Gb in, it now has 2 x 16Gb (maxed out). Time will tell if that fixes it :slight_smile:

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