Just idly wondering

I’m sure I’m doing this inefficiently but my PC is currently chewing through a task in excel (- big spreadhseet, slightly complex operation that I wish I’d thought harder about before I started it)

PC’s a quad processor but using only 1 core – fair enough, it’s an oldish version of excel and quite a complex task anyway (and it’s ticking over anyway under 10% workload)

… but why is it using only 4 of 8gb memory – can each core only access 4bg ?

I’ll be because it’s a 32bit application. 32bit only allows to address up to 4gb.

Thanks, that makes sense – (steady, here comes more stoopid: ) – and true even though the underlying OS is 64 bit ?

” Excel has made 1605785 replacements “

😳

Yes. Generally speaking, software is required to be built in 32 or 64 bit. Most software is still built in 32bit because, while a 64bit CPU and OS is compatible with 32bit, a 32bit CPU and OS are incompatible with 64bit and there is still a significant portion of 32bit stuff out there.

Yes. I have a fairly decent PC with 16GB ram running 64 bit Windows and Office 365. I got sloppy with a big Excel file and it froze up and crashed. The error message said something to do with a 4GB memory limit (i.e. the 32 bit limit).

Do you have a decent GPU onboard? You can enable hardware acceleration to speed things up.

(My Quadfire rig rips though excel docs)

I do have a decent GPU but office 2007 ( 😳 ) doesn’t support that sort of carry on

If you’ve got Office 2013 or 2016 you have the option of downloading 32 or 64bit versions of Office (assume you can with older versions but would need the media) even MS recommend the 32but version but I don’t really know why, even the most basic PCs come with 4GB RAM these days, usually more.

Yeh 32 bit applications run on 64 bit platforms fine, but they still only run in 32 bit ‘mode’.

funnily enough, just been looking and I could* have office 365 for free through my job

*If I could work out what my password was when I ordered it months ago. Ah well, can reset next week I suppose