SolidWorks Stability Issues

[markocosic]

What's the trick to not having this bloody package fall over ever 30 minutes when dealing with assemblies of more than ~30 parts? http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_frown.gif

Am having a mare of a time making pretty/cleaning up/joining together disparate assemblies. (not doing any FEA/CFD/surfacing etc - mostly just extruded/revolved parts with the odd fillet and no imported data)

Dell Latitude D410 on WinXP (latest updates), running SolidWorks 2006-2007. Pentium M 1.7Ghz processor, 1.5Gb memory (shared with graphics), 5+Gb free HDD sapce for pagefiles.

Every now and then it'll complain that it's out of memory (!), other times it'll just shut/disappear/end task itself. The assembly itself is only ~5Mb in size!

[markocosic]

What's the trick to not having this bloody package fall over ever 30 minutes when dealing with assemblies of more than ~30 parts? http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_frown.gif

Am having a mare of a time making pretty/cleaning up/joining together disparate assemblies. (not doing any FEA/CFD/surfacing etc - mostly just extruded/revolved parts with the odd fillet and no imported data)

Dell Latitude D410 on WinXP (latest updates), running SolidWorks 2006-2007. Pentium M 1.7Ghz processor, 1.5Gb memory (shared with graphics), 5+Gb free HDD sapce for pagefiles.

Every now and then it'll complain that it's out of memory (!), other times it'll just shut/disappear/end task itself. The assembly itself is only ~5Mb in size!

[JHarshbarger]

Whenever I use Solidworks on my laptop, it's run really slow for a couple minutes every once in awhile. I've noticed that when it does this, it is caching to the HDD. I've installed a program to limit caching to the HDD, and it's helped a little. It still happens every once and awhile.

I don't know if this is the same problem you're having. Also, I haven't run that version of SW on any computer. Have you tried tech support?

[Erich Ohlde]

do you have the solidworks updates? i know there are a couple service packs that might help

[TG]

When you are doing this, open up the process manager on the computer and see how much memory you are using. Remember, Windows reserves half of the memory on your computer for operating system use. You might find that you are desperately low on memory and that the computer is constantly dumping and loading different parts from Solidworks into the memory and might not be able to handle the ~30 parts.

I have a laser scanned model of our engine with thousands and thousands of trangulated surfaces (I haven't had the time to convert it to NURBS). The file for the complete engine assembly is nearly half a gig and that alone slows solidworks down tremendously, and I'm running 2 gig memory plus 256 meg graphics.

[markocosic]

Process Manager shows nothing untoward: 250Mb when you start it up, then anywhere between 50Mb and 400Mb when using it (amazing how much it jumps about though...) always loads of memory free, but it seemed to think it had run out...

Now sorted - computer-guru mate said try turn off McAfee On-Access Scan virus scanning and it's fine. More than fine actually - sooooo much quicker! I guess Solidworks must be forever accessing it's own files and sometimes got confused? Just need to remember to re-enable it afterwards now. http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_smile.gif

[Kurt Bilinski]

Rant
I'm convinced that apps like McAfee and Norton waste exactly the same amount of time you would have wasted had you gotten a virus. And, if you paid yourself minimum wages for the time it wasted, it would have exactly compensated you for whatever damages incurred by the virus.
/Rant.

[billywight]

Another thing that I found was that the Microsoft Intellipoint mouse driver screws with SolidWorks (and Co-create especially) - lots of freezing up and slow processing. I uninstalled it and switched to a different mouse and things were much better.

A lot of SW problems are caused by the graphics card - even the 256 gig cards have problems if they're not open GL. The good cards that SW recomends work like a champ, but they only come in the workstations and those are pricey.