Excel Hangs Frequently - any suggestions?

cafarrer
cafarrer Member Posts: 3 New User
edited February 2024 in 2018 Archives
I  have a new ATC-780 running Windows 10, Office 365 with Excel 16.  Excel frequently hangs (after about 5 minutes of editing a spreadsheet) requiring me to use Task Manager to cancel the process. Very repeatable. I've followed the Microsoft suggestions on repair build, check for updates, switch from 32 bit to 64 bit, etc.  But none of them work.

Has anyone seen this with the ATC-780?

Answers

  • billsey
    billsey ACE Posts: 35,080 Trailblazer
    Do you see the hang with any other software? When it's hung does Task Manager show lots of CPU usage for Excel? How about disk activity when in failure mode? Memory usage by Excel when in failure? It's unlikely to be a bug in Excel that's causing the hang, but could be a situation where it's trying to use more resources than you have available. It could also be a macro or script that's running amok.
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  • cafarrer
    cafarrer Member Posts: 3 New User
    I finally got an error message when Excel hangs (no other software has shown this issue) It says "there is not enough memory to complete the action"  I checked out the memory usage shown in task manager and it ranges between 30-35%.  But I added up the memory used from all the active and background tasks and it is nowhere near that.  I have 12GB DRAM on the system and the usage is around 1.9GB or 15%.  I think there may be something wrong with the system and how it is allocating/recognizing memory.  I'm going to pull the SODIMMs out and reseat them and see if that changes anything. Strange part of this is that if I look at system configuration details from the control panel, it shows 12GB. But from what is shown in Task manager, it seems like the system thinks there is only 6GB. 
  • billsey
    billsey ACE Posts: 35,080 Trailblazer
    IIRC that error message sometimes appears when Windows runs out of resources as well as when system memory runs out. You can have plenty of free memory but too many active tasks/windows/file handles. How large and complex are the spreadsheets you are working on? What else is running?
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  • cafarrer
    cafarrer Member Posts: 3 New User
    Thanks Billsey - I've had no issues with this spreadsheet on a couple of other machines that have less DRAM.  It is a good sized spreadsheet; but not outrageous.  Not many other things running (Google Chrome, Powerpoint). I have noticed Windows 10 has about a hundred background apps running that seem to consume a lot of resources.  But Task Manager still shows ~6GB of memory available and excel is using about 200MB.  Seems like excel/Windows 10 doesn't really understand what's available
  • billsey
    billsey ACE Posts: 35,080 Trailblazer
    Not a lot more I can say to help out... It's likely something like file handles since it doesn't sound like it could be number of windows. Definitely not too little DRAM. Any chance the copy of the spreadsheet itself is corrupted? At this point I'd probably open a ticket with MS to see if they can help, since it sounds like you've exhausted the community side of things.
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