Is my system to blame or my use of it? Really slow ADT....

[vladzie]

I have the following ;

WIN xp pro 2002 (SP1)
256 Ram
AMD athlon xp 1800+ (1.54 Ghz)
NVIDIA GeForce MX 440 (64mb?)
57GB HD memory free

Architectural Desktop 3.3
Photoshop
Illustrator
Office xp pro

I tend to swap a lot between photoshop and ADT whilst working.
Problems encountered, numerous, many tempers broken, tears shed and deadlines missed >:-< ;

~ Fatal error - unhandled access violations. Resulted in corrupt files, un-auditable and un-recoverable.(thank god for re-useable backup files)

~ 3D files (3mb)take a hell of a long time to open and are especially bad when opening up a layout with only 6 viewports.(cannot close vp's need them open to arrange)and very slow plots.

~I've looked at the Autodesk site and its not helped me to understand. I've purged everything there is to purge, and increased my virtial memory to 1000 (good or bad??) and
yet it still boggishly and annoyingly slow.

~Using CAD slows down rest of system but this sometimes happens when using photoshop on its own.

Is it my system?????

Please if anyone can recommend anything for any of the problems, it would be greatly appreciated.

oh and i've recently reformated C: and reinstalled everything...but all is still on one partition... should I really partition it? and how many?

P.S I'm only a lowly self taught cad user (1yr) not an expert.....

 

[twlincoln]

256MB of System RAM is very low... I would think about (at a bare minimum) doubling that to 512MB or max it out (typically 1 or 2 GB)... I consider 256MB to be just enough to run Windows and minimal type applications.

PhotoShop & ADT will be swampping to HD all day long... RAM is cheap.

- Tracy

 

[DISH]

Welcome to the world of ACAD.
I have also looked for help on this and finally faced the fact that ACAD/Windows Crashes. Backup often and get to know your autosave folder really well.
From what I have experienced, the bigger the file the more crashing that occurs. Purge often to remove unwanted bits of data from deleted files ect.
Tracy is correct Bump up that RAM.
Another thing that you can try is to give priority to ACAD.
You can read about it here. (

http://www.tweakxp.com/tweak205.aspx)

P.S. Don't try to set it to realtime, it will freeze your machine.
Hope this helps somewhat

 

[CADSTUDENT]

One possibility is that your system may have a virus/worm/trojan, since you mentioned other application software was also slow. One thing you can do is monitor CPU usage in the windows task manager. Also, look at the performance tab to see any odd DLL usage. I had a virus attack SVCHOST application that tremiously slowed my system down. If you have a virus program then you need to run it. Hope this helps - John.

 

[BillPSU]

Run msconfig from the start menu, run. Check what programs are running at startup. If this machine has been used for Internet access some additional programs may be running which you don't want or need. Remove these files from startup.

The RAM is definitely another problem.