xp/2003 vs vista/2007

[Gary Keramidas]

i am just curious if anyone sees a substantial degradation of speed when using
vistax64/2007 vs xp/2003.

i was on the beta for both vista and office 2007, and refuse to use either.

i dual boot. when i run an app under vistax64/2007, it takes 4 seconds to
complete, while under xp/2003 it's maybe a second. i know it doesn't seem like
much, but everything i run is slower. this particular app loads and closes about
10 workbooks while it populates a schedule and does some other things. i
personally think they're both useless and i'm glad i got them for free.

someday when i feel like punishing myself, i'll install my 32 bit version of
vista and see if it's any better.

 

[NOPIK]

i am just curious if anyone sees a substantial degradation of speed when using
vistax64/2007 vs xp/2003.

Office efficiency mostly depends on video driver perfomance (to test,
you need to disable screen update in your macro) - I test Offices from
97 to 2007 on Core 2 Duo 6300 with 2Gb RAM (you must have at least 2Gb
to archieve same memory space conditions in XP and Vista, otherwise,
you can compensate it with multiply reloads of Office application you
test, to assure, that it completely cashed in RAM) and windows from
98SE(Support only 768Mb RAM and old Offices) to Vista. Results depend
only on Video subsystem (used onboard, PCI, PCI-E), or, on Driver
performance (tested on PCI-E GeForce6800 with different ForceWare
versions). Win98 gives worse results, than other systems - it has no
full video hardware acceleration support (I used system with AMDs X2
and Athlon, both based on Manchester core to test dependense on CPU
number). Win2000's result is best, and I bet, due well optimised
drivers (almost all issues fixed, after a long time). Vista shows best
multiple CPU support (for macro, that creates word report and
PowerPoint poster,based on external application data, sent to Excel)

 

[Bob Flanagan]

I ran a test of doing a monte carlo simulation with 2003 and 2007. 10,000
simulations in 2003 took 5 minutes. In Excel 2007, it took almost two
hours.

I populated a column with rand() and then recalculated the worksheet 1000
times. It took Excel 2007 twice as long to do the calculations.

In another test, I copied cells 10,000 times to another sheet. It tok Excel
2007 almost three times as long to do the copying.

To make charts, Excel 2003 can make 100 charts in 8 seconds. Excel 2007
takes almost 4 minutes.

We have one workbook that refreshes links fine in 2003. In 2007, refreshing
links crashes Excel.

Saving and opening files seems to take twice as long.

So far Excel 2007 is slower at everything

Bob Flanagan
Macro Systems
http://www.add-ins.com
Productivity add-ins and downloadable books on VB macros for Excel

 

[Nick Hodge]

Bob

Have MS been in touch to get your models?

A couple of things for sure.

1) Some calcs can be significantly sped up by turning off multi-threading
when that is not possible (Excel Options>Advanced>Formulas)
2) The .xlsb (binary format) is optimized for speed
3) Any interactions with VBA will slow things down considerably as the
multi-threading engine is not added to VBA hence Excel will need to hop in
and out of modes

For linking, again, Excel uses a totally different model and some things
have changed. For example, with the new grid if you had a range name of
ABC123, this is no longer valid and XL has to change all references to that
to _ABC123 to stop it clashing. All range names starting xl are no longer
valid as XL uses these for internal tasks, so again this will cause issues.

Maybe this document may help with some answers

http://nickhodge.co.uk/blog/index.php/2007/03/31/migrating-to-excel-2007/

--
HTH
Nick Hodge
Microsoft MVP - Excel
Southampton, England
(e-mail address removed)
web: www.nickhodge.co.uk
blog: www.nickhodge.co.uk/blog/

FREE UK OFFICE USER GROUP MEETING, MS READING, 27th APRIL 2007
www.officeusergroup.co.uk

 

[Bob Flanagan]

Yes, I was contacted late yesterday by email by MS. Sounds like they
definitely want to improve calc speed. I expect to hear back early next
week.

Bob

 

[Gary Keramidas]

trust me, screenupdating is not the problem, it's turned off.

 

[syswizard]

Yes, I was contacted late yesterday by email by MS. Sounds like they
definitely want to improve calc speed. I expect to hear back early next
week.

Bob













- Show quoted text -

Bob - whatever happened to these issues ? I am very interested also.
Were you in direct contact with the Excel product manager ?

 

[Gary Keramidas]

i sent my files to the address here

http://blogs.msdn.com/excel/archive/2007/04/23/help-us-make-excel-pivottables-faster.aspx