I have had a Dell XPS laptop for a while now. I am very satisfied with it. It is very fast and reliable.

I have Windows Vista and Office 2003 installed, and everything worked fine but Excel. It was crashing all the time, and I had to run it in a virtual machine.

Excel was crashing with the following error:

Faulting application EXCEL.EXE, version 11.0.8237.0, time stamp 0x48eff43b, faulting module OLEAUT32.dll, version 6.0.6001.18000, time stamp 0x4791a74f, exception code 0xc0000005, fault offset 0×00004580, process id 0x6b4, application start time 0x01c95f0ed33d2368.

I have been trying to solve the problem for a while. I finally figured out that the problem was caused by a Bluetooth Add-in that was auto starting with Excel.

If you have a similar problem this might solve it, it did for me:

Open registry and locate HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\Excel\Addins\BtOfficeAddin.BtOfficeIntegration.1

Change the key LoadBehavior from 3 to 0.

Exit registry edit and try Excel. It helped me.

But that is acceptable memory consumption because today Terminal servers need much more memory than 4GB which is the limit of a 32Bit system. 4GB of memory is enough for around 50 users, using regular office applications but for anything else a 64bit system is a must have.