Time to open .doc/.xls/.ppt

[tbar2112]

Hi,

At some point, my machine just got incredible slow when opening documents in these formats. I am not sure whether it got that way over time or overnight, but I have the feeling it is something specific. It was certainly not that way when it was new some 8 months ago. After that I have added another GB of RAM.

An .xls file og 60Kb takes about 20 seconds to open, this is well after startup programs have been loaded.

I do regular maintenance on registry as well as removing temp-files etc.

Any idea what the reason for this is?

[tomh009]

If you start Excel/Word/etc directly, are they also slow to start? Have you checked your disk fragmentation? What type of antivirus software are you running?

[tbar2112]

If you start Excel/Word/etc directly, are they also slow to start? Have you checked your disk fragmentation? What type of antivirus software are you running?

The time example I gave related to when Excel was already open. I marked the file in win explorer and pressed enter. Fragmentation is 16% with 30% file fragmentation. I am running Norman Antivirus.

[tomh009]

You probably should defrag, though that level should not cause this big a delay.

Norton antivirus? If so, take a look at the configuration for the realtime protection. It's probably set to scan files whenever they are accessed or modified; I would change this to scanning only when the files are modified, as that will eliminate a lot of redundant virus scanning activity.

[tbar2112]

That was not a typo, I am running Norman (http://www.norman.com/). I will look for similar behavior in that application.

It looks like the time to open is quite variable - sometimes the times I indicated, sometimes faster. But I don't know if the anti virus could cause a behavior like that.

[hoya]

I have encountered that issue as well but I've never been able to determine the cause. I thought it was my antivirus but that never seemed to have an effect. let us know what you find.

[kengetz]

Although I doubt this is your problem, it seems worth mentioning. On my neighbor's desktop, he had been using Excel and Word without troubles. Then, one day, loading each started taking minutes, rather than seconds. Turns out his computer only had 256MB memory, and some update to Windows had managed to cause his default memory footprint to be larger than 256MB (meaning that his hard disk was thrashing, all the time). I increased his memory to 1GB, and life is good again.

If you are working with severely constrained memory, you might consider this is an issue. I have no idea what changed in Windows to cause this trouble, but adding memory definitely cured it. -- Ken