Excel takes a long time to close 2

[garwain]

One of my clients has an old (5 year) Compaq computer with windows98 and office 97 installed on it. The machine responds quite well, except when it comes to closing Excel. His main spreadsheet is about 300K, and opens in a second, but takes over a minute to close.

Anyone have any ideas as to what I should look at to speed this up? If I don't get any other ideas soon, I'll have him locate his office 97 disk, and re-install it, hoping for the best.

Thanks
Ben

 

[Sypher2]

What exactly happens when he tries to close Excel? Does Excel appear to freeze? Is Excel doing some sort of operation at close?

Is there any code in the Workbook_BeforeClose event?

 

[garwain]

I don't think there are any macros or events on the worksheet. I'll check though.

When closing the workbook, excel freezes for about a minute, there is disk activity for the first 5 or 6 seconds, the task manager will show the program as not responding, but it'll eventually shut down on it's own.

 

[Edrondol]

This is because of an Outlook issue that has to do with the Journaling. If the Journal is turned on, it automatically puts a message into a log file when an Excel or Word document is opened. If they need to keep the Journal on for some reason, simply go to C:\WINDOWS\OFFITEMS.LOG and delete this file. It will grow again, of course, but a simple batch file in the scheduler can take care of this. Otherwise, you can turn off the Journal in Outlook and it'll take care of itself. -Dave

Any dog is just a dog. But if he has you
by the butt he's MR. Dog!

 

[garwain]

I haven't been back to the client's yet, but I'll definatly check on that.

Thanks.

 

[SteveBausch]

Also, directly saving to floppy is slow, and risky. Tends to corrupt files.


May just be time for housekeeping. Uninstall all un-needed programs, all un-needed files. I assume FAT as the file system.

Suggest a really serious attempt to defrag the system. Boot from a floppy, have a batch file set up to repeatedly call Defrag, forced. Defragging from Windows is problematic, because of all the programs (screensaver, etc.) running in the background.


As far as the batch file is concerned, I doubt that defrag has changed much in the last five years or so. Here is the contents of HyprDfrg.Bat

defrag C: /f
defrag C: /f
defrag C: /f
defrag C: /f
defrag C: /f
defrag C: /f
defrag C: /f
defrag C: /f
defrag C: /f
defrag C: /f
defrag C: /f
defrag C: /f
defrag C: /f
defrag C: /f
defrag C: /f
defrag C: /f
defrag C: /f
defrag C: /f

As you can tell, it's not brain surgery. Best run overnite, or over a weekend.