searches slow on some computers fast on others?

[EdLeeYoung]

Our head accountant downloaded the statments into a spreadsheet. Because the
line limit is reached when doing we end up with two worksheets. She then
gives a copy of the .xls to the other two accountants.

When our head accountant does a search its extreamly fast...it takes about
13 seconds to reach the account at the bottom of the first sheet.
When either of the other two does a search it takes about 80 seconds to
reach account at the bottom of the first sheet.

Btw the second page has an extreamly fast search for all accountants...as
fast as the first sheet for the head accountant. One accountant thought it
was the size of the first sheet so he cut and pasted to make the first and
second sheet the same size...the first sheet was just as slow as it was
before and the second sheet just as fast.

This did not make since to me...the head accountant has a IBM Thinkpad, CPU
1133 mhz, and 250mb Ram while the other accountants have Pentium 4 desktops,
2.41Ghz, and 512 mb Ram...all using Win2000 and the same Office package.

I had one of the other accountants create the original .xls from the
statements. The same thing happened with the end result...the head accountant
with a laptop had a faster search than the others.

Does anyone understand what is happening to us?

 

[Henry]

Ed,

Just an idea, but could this be due to harddrive access times and cache
sizes?
What else is sitting in memory?
Are there any other applications running (in the background?)?
A large file may not fit into memory with excel.exe and anything else that's
sitting there, causing a lot of harddrive accesses.

Henry