Cover 7 problems

Hi,

The user that does our lesson Cover for us uses the SIMS Cover 7.
She has always complained that it was 'slow' around this time when there are lots of covers to do over the exam season. Realistically, this is one person complaining, about one single piece of software, I'm not going to give it a lot of attention if there is something that is affecting more people.

But, we're in the process of upgrading her computer, from a dual core to core 2 duo, so this should be faster, also we've got some more RAM on order for her.

but, would it be worth upgrading her to Windows 64bit ? Is this any faster than 32bit, for this sort of SQL fetching ?

I know if we user the 64bit, we can give her more than 4gb of RAM, so this would help a bit, but I'm wondering if the actual 64bitty ness would effect it too.
It would be the only 64bit client in the school.

We use Cover on 64bit windows. It is one of the slower bits of SIMS - it always has seemed to be; we were a field trial school back before it was first released and it was like that then. Loading the daily cover screen, making edits, its generally quite lethargic. Moving to 64 bit from 32 bit XP made no noticable difference in daily use. Its just the nature of the beast.

The only caveat I would make: is the rest of SIMS slow on that machine - if so, you might notice an improvement if you upgrade the hardware.
I suppose if you are upgrading the hardware anyway it makes no odds - if it helps things its a bonus, it it doesn't its beyond your control to do much about it.

I wouldn't think it was worth the hassle of having just one 64bit client. Make the rest of support easy by making it a fairly standard machine. A bit of extra RAM should help, but to be honest, 4GB will be fine. It rarely needs that much, unless you're running a massive photo laden report with multiple pages.
4GB should be enough to hold the whole mdf file in RAM.
What can help is if they shut SIMS down for a few minutes every hour, if it really is getting slow to respond.
I did some Cover training on Wednesday, and there were maybe 15 people out or needing cover and it was fine on a basic 2GB machine. After each cover you just wait a few seconds for it to process and refresh the screen.