Word and Excel Running Slow

noker

Word and excel have started runnining very slow for me on XP. Anyone any ideas what could be causing this to happen??

koloughlin

Sometimes it can be because your machine has run of out RAM and is using Virtual Memory. Virtual Memory means that the machine is using your hard disk as if it was RAM. When this happens things can get very slow because the hard disk is orders of magnitude slower than RAM to put and retrieve data.

Open task manager and for a rough idea if this is happening go to the performance tab and see if Total Commit Charge is bigger than Total Physical Memory.

You can google for sites that will help you shut down unnecessary services that are using memory. You may also have a lot of applications that are running at startup and just sitting there using memory. This could be uninstalled or configured not to start at starup.

Of course it's also possible you have a virus on your machine and you might want to check your machine out with a couple of different virus checkers and spyware detectors.

noker

Thanks. Scanned with AVG and found viruses. Removed them, re-installed office but programs are still running slow. Memory seems ok but there is a lot of programms on computer.