Excel Not Responding

I have some workbooks on a laptop computer (Windows 7 and Excel 2007) to run a table tennis tournament one time per month. Yesterday I was running the tournament and kept getting an 'Excel Not Responding' message. It would hang the computer for a very long time and finally it gave me a box that said something like "The excel workbook has an issue and gave an option to try to fix the issue" which I chose. Then it was still running the fix for about 40 minutes and I had to end it and calculate the final results manually.

I also got a message saying "Automatic Update of links has been disabled".


I had run the same workbooks the previous month and had not changed anything, so I don't know what happened in between.

By the way after last night I copied the files to my desktop and they ran with no problem.

I also ran them again on my laptop and there were the occasional "Not Responding' but I was able to complete the final results there as well.
The message on the "Automatic Update of links has been disabled" still occurring. That message does not occur when using the workbook on my desktop computer.

Can anyone offer steps I can do to solve these two issues?

Thanks,
Pongmeister

Thanks much for the suggestions and I will try them out and let you know the results!!