I'm working on a massive download consisting of 1.2M rows of data. The file is over 110 megabytes. I'm using XP with 4gig of Ram on a dual core 2.3ghz processor. XP only recognized 3.5gigs of ram.

I only need to perform basic manipulations on this file, but it's crashing my system. I can open it. But other than opening it and simple searching, almost any calculation or sort kills it.

I'm considering to upgrade to Win7 and throw 8gigs of ram at it, but I'm not sure this will even work. Does anyone have any thoughts on how to best work with this file? Would using MS Access have better results. I'm not really constrained by budget as this is fairly critical and need to work with this file in its current format?

Any help appreciated!