DCG students: do you find SolidWorks 2009 stable?

Comer1

I'm a DCG teacher and we had a few problems with SolidWorks 2009 being very slow to start up on our Dell PCs. It could take as long as a few minutes for the program to start up. We also had a few students (whose work involved lots of parts or very complicated assemblies) crashing, as in stop responding or just reverting back to the desktop with any changes made to the work lost. I'm trying to determine if this is a problem with our setup or is it more widespread. So did you experience any of these problems with your schools PCs?

Thanks in advance.

brianwalshcork

Hi Comer1,

What's the spec of your machines? I've found Solidworks performance to be closely tied to the processor, and not the grapchics card as you'd expect with 3D CAD software (although a bad card will give bad results too!)... but that's talking more about the performance when it's running, rather than during startup.
I have sub 30 second start up times for SW on my oldest machines Pentium D 380s.

What Add ins are you loading on startup & do you need them.

Do you have many background tasks running? (Anti virus, disk indexers etc)

Does SW start faster on some machines than on others?
Are all your machines the same spec?


Re. the crashing out to desktop that you described below - I've seen that when I used unapproved graphic cards or drivers.
Solidworks 2009 is prone to some flakiness, but it's far better than 2008 though!

Comer1 wrote: »

I'm a DCG teacher and we had a few problems with SolidWorks 2009 being very slow to start up on our Dell PCs. It could take as long as a few minutes for the program to start up. We also had a few students (whose work involved lots of parts or very complicated assemblies) crashing, as in stop responding or just reverting back to the desktop with any changes made to the work lost. I'm trying to determine if this is a problem with our setup or is it more widespread. So did you experience any of these problems with your schools PCs?

Thanks in advance.

Comer1

Hi Brian

Thanks for the quick reply. We are using the original Dell machines supplied at the start of the new course. C2D 1.8Ghz, with 2GB of RAM on Win XP. The only background application running is Symantec antivirus. The only add-in that loads on some of the machines is Photoworks (even that is'nt loading at startup on all machines.) I've had inservice in Kilkenny with the same PCs and I found those just as slow to start SW. I have checked out the task manager during SW startup and neither the CPU or RAM are being taxed to any great extent.

As for the crashing, my own PC has never chashed with SWs and it was the same two students on the same two PCs that experienced this so perhaps it was the machines or something they were doing.

I would like to get SWs starting a bit faster though as students keep double-clicking the icon, starting SWs a number of times which just slows the whole process even more.

I suppose my question is to people who are using the original Dells that we all got when the course started.

brianwalshcork

OK, I see what you mean re. the startup - it's difficult to know if SW is going to start, or if you didn't double click properly - I think that the lag before the splash screen shows is too long, even on fast computers.

Comer1 wrote: »

Hi Brian

Thanks for the quick reply. We are using the original Dell machines supplied at the start of the new course. C2D 1.8Ghz, with 2GB of RAM on Win XP. The only background application running is Symantec antivirus. The only add-in that loads on some of the machines is Photoworks (even that is'nt loading at startup on all machines.) I've had inservice in Kilkenny with the same PCs and I found those just as slow to start SW. I have checked out the task manager during SW startup and neither the CPU or RAM are being taxed to any great extent.

As for the crashing, my own PC has never chashed with SWs and it was the same two students on the same two PCs that experienced this so perhaps it was the machines or something they were doing.

I would like to get SWs starting a bit faster though as students keep double-clicking the icon, starting SWs a number of times which just slows the whole process even more.

I suppose my question is to people who are using the original Dells that we all got when the course started.

Crow92

I do technology, but still use solid works, my teacher was telling us if we wanted to use a student edition at home we'd need about 3-4 gb ram for it to run well.

brianwalshcork

It depends entirely on the size of the assembly!

Rossie17

Im just a student who has used it this year, about twice it crashed for me and I lost what I was doing at the time, was NOT fun at all...so I learned to save every 10 minutes. Also yeah it took a good 3-5 minutes for it to start up sometimes but that seemed to just be the computer I was assigned because some of the lads got theirs running in about 1-2. Thats just my experience.

Comer1

Thanks Rosie

Even 1-2 minutes is pretty slow

Eire-Dearg

Yep, ours was pretty slow but we had an underlying virus on the PCs in the first place, meaning computers crashed with or without SW.

hitlersson666

We use it on a dell and I HATE IT >.<

gant0

Horrible software!!!Some days its fine and then other days it starts crashing an not loading properlly,Glad I'm never going to have to you it again.

3_BOoYA_X

Comer1 wrote: »

Thanks Rosie

Even 1-2 minutes is pretty slow

You wouldn't wana come near our DCG room then, in the mornings some can take up to 10 minutes to start up. :mad: After that there fine and usually load within 2 minutes the second time.

Mkvenner

HI ALL

in my school we(the students of LC DCG) were given 1 year timed versions on solidworks!

it did it find it a slight hassle to install it onto my pc with all the emails and codes needed to be entered, but i just started up solidworks and it took about 40 seconds to load up. In school solidworks takes about 1- 2.30 minutes.
the pcs in school are dell

my conclusion is that the start up time is down to how good your pc is.
the better the pc, the less time, (durr)

as for that crashing problem, for my entire project solidworks only crashed on me once thats was due to my own fault and luckily i didnt loose enough work for me to cry over.
plus i have all my files backed up on a usb and on our dcg server. and i save after almost every major alteration!

so thats my advice, save alot, use a usb and try not to go "confusing the computer" (a quote from one of our DCG teachers last year XD)

calnand

Our computers run solidworks perfectly, I've never had a problem with it on my computer at least. I know people with very detailed parts it would take ages for them but normally they run fine. and they're just the bog standard Dell pcs everyone got.

Comer1

calnand wrote: »

Our computers run solidworks perfectly, I've never had a problem with it on my computer at least. I know people with very detailed parts it would take ages for them but normally they run fine. and they're just the bog standard Dell pcs everyone got.

Hi Calnand, that's good to hear (gives me hope that I can do something about speeding our start-up time for SWs). How long does it take before the splash screen typically shows itself? Do you know if the PCs have all latest updates, and what service pack is installed for SWs? We are working on the version that came on disk (not updated anything) SWs 2009 SP 2.1

I know that you may not have this information...but it doesn't hurt to ask.

Thanks