Pentium M and desktop P4 MS Excel performance.

I have a customer who use a hefty Excel 2003 workbook with maybe 10 sheets
and a lot a lot of VBA and formulas. On a midrange P4 laptop recalculating
this takes maybe 5 minutes. On a top-end Pentium-M tablet laptop it would
take over an hour if I left it. Could this in any way be down to the
different CPU or could it be other factors? Looking at the system monitor as
it's running, the excel task never goes above about 10% CPU usage.


TIA

One Punch Mickey wrote:
I have a customer who use a hefty Excel 2003 workbook with maybe 10 sheets
and a lot a lot of VBA and formulas. On a midrange P4 laptop recalculating
this takes maybe 5 minutes. On a top-end Pentium-M tablet laptop it would
take over an hour if I left it. Could this in any way be down to the
different CPU or could it be other factors? Looking at the system monitor as
it's running, the excel task never goes above about 10% CPU usage.


TIA



It most certainly can be other factors. A "tablet" is not a fair
comparison to anything since they have to make many many sacrefices to
get it to work in such a constrained size. Power limitations are one
thing, as is heating. Both of these will keep the CPU from performing
at its best. Then the tablet probably has less memory, a slower drive,
and a slower connection to both. However, I can tell you a part is the
CPU. P4 has better floating point (decimal) arithmetic than the PM and
if that PM is not the latest model it doesn't support SSE3. I don't
know if Excel 2003 uses those instructions, but if it does that would
provide a speedup you couldn't get on the older PM chip (but could on
the latest ones).

It comes down to: you have to tell us the exact technical specs of both
machines, not just say "P4 laptop" and "PM tablet".

Alex

One Punch Mickey wrote:

I have a customer who use a hefty Excel 2003 workbook with maybe 10 sheets
and a lot a lot of VBA and formulas. On a midrange P4 laptop recalculating
this takes maybe 5 minutes. On a top-end Pentium-M tablet laptop it would
take over an hour if I left it. Could this in any way be down to the
different CPU or could it be other factors? Looking at the system monitor as
it's running, the excel task never goes above about 10% CPU usage.

"Tablet" doesn't exactly imply "high performance". Given the low CPU
usage, I would guess that the tablet PC is I/O-bound; i.e. the hard
drive is too slow.

--
Mike Smith

"Mike Smith" wrote in message
...

One Punch Mickey wrote:

I have a customer who use a hefty Excel 2003 workbook with maybe 10
sheets and a lot a lot of VBA and formulas. On a midrange P4 laptop
recalculating this takes maybe 5 minutes. On a top-end Pentium-M tablet
laptop it would take over an hour if I left it. Could this in any way be
down to the different CPU or could it be other factors? Looking at the
system monitor as it's running, the excel task never goes above about 10%
CPU usage.

"Tablet" doesn't exactly imply "high performance". Given the low CPU
usage, I would guess that the tablet PC is I/O-bound; i.e. the hard drive
is too slow.

More memory might help too. I bet there's a memory difference between
the two machines.

DS

Yeah the desktops are 1GB, the tablet 512MB.

On 4/28/2005 11:26, One Punch Mickey wrote:
Yeah the desktops are 1GB, the tablet 512MB.

Another thing to consider is that when on battery I'll bet that P-M is not
even hitting a GHz.

~Jason

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