SolidWorks Tools that keep your workstation healthy

Working constantly in support for Intercad I have a few tips that may help if your system is unstable. These are things to look at and good practices that will keep your system healthy.

1. The video card maybe having trouble.
Go the SolidWorks video card testing site https://www.solidworks.com/sw/support/videocardtesting.html This site not only has video cards but systems that have been tested with that card and the video card driver used. The video driver may not be the latest but it has been certified and tested by SolidWorks.

2. Brand named computers are not much more expensive but the time lost when there is a conflict between computer drivers is well worth the extra money compare to white box or DIY machine. Similarly building your own computer to a specification can also have pitfalls. One client found this out when he purchased a cheap power supply which although specified correctly was not up to the job.

3. Use Rx. This tool is definetly underused and has a lot of helpful features.

Two are circled above;
a) Click here to launch SolidWorks in Software OpenGL mode. This lets you start SolidWorks and bypass your graphics cards using the computer processor to produce the image. Very helpful if you suspect crashing due to your graphics card as it will be stable.

b) Click here to launch SolidWorks while bypassing the Tools Options settings. If you have exited the program illegally you may have some corruption of your registry settings. This bypasses your computers registry and uses “Out of the Box” settings. If your instability is resolved using this contact Intercad or your local VAR and they can edit your registry to fix this.

4. Maintenance of your system.
Rx is again the tool you should make use of.

The system maintenance tab.
Notice above that it will clean out not only temporary SolidWorks files but normal temp and internet temp files. You can also see at the bottom circled two really neat features that allow you to select your computer drives and do a check disk and run defragmenter.
Lastly how often and when do I have time you ask?
When selecting Start Maintenance it will ask you whether you want to do this

Now
Daily
Weekly
Monthly
and at what time.

All you need to do is set it and it will do as often as you want when you want even if you aren’t there as long as your machine is on. Rx is the easy way to keep your machine clean and the hard drive clear. Go To Start>All Programs>SolidWorks xxx>SolidWorks Tools> SolidWorks Rx.

More tips later …

Mark Duggan
Intercad Technical Support Mgr

SolidWorks, does ‘works’ just fine sometimes you just need to tweak your workflow a little…

Working on Intercad’s Technical Support team you come across many customers that sometimes just seem to struggle with the performance of their machine(s) and as SolidWorks adds greater value to the product each year this performance appears to go downhill… Not true!

I’d have to say nearly 80% of SolidWorks performance related issues are the blame of an incompatible video card or just the video driver. As SolidWorks is so reliant on the openGL functionality of your video card having the right hardware and configuration is critical, the right hardware or driver can give you either a good or bad experience with CAD software. To aid this SolidWorks produce their own drivers which are available on their website at www.solidworks.com if you have not checked your video driver for updates in the last 6 months please do. The drivers can be filtered on the site by Vendor (please also note that DELL and HP are also listed as cards for these systems are specific to DELL and HP configurations) SolidWorks version and system can also be filtered.

Not only hardware and drivers but your workflow may just need updating…

With each new version of SolidWorks there are many new features, many of which are customer driven enhancements. With these new features the software inevitably becomes larger, this will lead to you more than likely requiring an update yourself! In the past few releases SolidWorks has added many performance enhancements to assist you in getting the most out of you currant system. SolidWorks prides itself in the customer not having to constantly upgrade their hardware, so performance enhancements like SpeedPak, greater functionality in Lightweight mode, and Large Assembly Modes are added to assist you.

In the recent release of SolidWorks 2009 there have been many fantastic performance related enhancements, one of which I have noticed is in the drawing views. As you zoom in and out SolidWorks is adding view detail as you zoom in, this means that when you are just looking at the sheet from a page fit perspective not every little piece of data is loaded into the views leaving greater RAM space. This feature has been added to improve dynamic display speed and generation of drawing views.

The new SpeedPak functionality is brilliant offering you the ability to insert large sub-assemblies into an even larger top level assembly, not only this but all you BOM and annotation features are still available. SpeedPak allows you to generate drawings of large assemblies quicker than ever before. Another fantastic feature of the SpeedPak is you can email only the assembly file and not all the references as all the reference information is added to the file when you generate the SpeedPak.

Other features like “Quick View/Selective Open”, Display States and the ability to load specified drawing sheets have been added in SolidWorks 2009, this giving you the ability to only load 1 or 2 sheets of a large drawing file, maybe just to make a minor adjustment, save as PDF or print.

To summarise the above, SolidWorks has so many great performance enhancing features with every new release that it can be hard to keep track of them all in our little worlds. SolidWorks together with Intercad and other vendors all over the world have put together Innovation Days that you can attend to gain this vital information. So don’t get left behind with this extremely fast paced developing software and get along to one of these events, also take the opportunity to speak with Technical Support staff and SolidWorks affiliates from around the globe!

Don’t get left behind, finding yourself using SolidWorks 2009 with your old 2003 techniques!

Watch this space for more…

Micah Speight
Intercad Pty Limited., www.intercad.com.au
Authorized Solidworks Reseller in Autralia & New Zealand