Solidworks Toolbox Problem

[Casey96SS]

We have two seats of SW 2004. We are sharing the toolbox on a network drive on our Win 2000 server. All computer equipment if fairly recent. Network connection is 100 MPS.

Our major problem is the toolbox seems very slow when inserting fasteners. It takes around 30 seconds for a fastener to appear on the screen after I drag it out of the tool box. Several times I have gotten an error that says "Error writing preview bitmaps. The preview bitmaps will be created dynamically from the file which may take longer to process." We first started noticing slow performance after seeing this error.

Any idea what is causing this our how we can fix this. We have tried completly wiping out the toolbox in the past. This gives us a clean slate to start with, but we loose all of our p/n's and descriptions we have entered for the fastners. It also screw up our assemblies because we loose all the configurations we have created for the fasteners.

We love Solidworks, but the toolbox and smart fasteners are really pissing us off.

 

[ShaggyPE]

I have never been pleased with ToolBox. Namely for two reasons: I have had problems 1)in a multi-user environment and 2) when I do work for other clients, the same fastener needs to be assigned different numbers. I use design tables for all my fasteners and insert them and pattern their locations.

 

[Casey96SS]

We have been very fustrated by the toolbox and smart fasteners. I have had cases were SW will put a smart fastener in an extruded cut on a part I imported from Mechanical Desktop 4.0, and it will not put a smart fastener in a hole I created with the hole wizard on a new part in SW. It is almost like the program is mocking me!

Anyone else have any input on the preview bitmap error I mentioned above. Any toolbox advice is appreciated.

 

[NathanN]

Have you converted your toolbox files to the 2004 format?

 

[Casey96SS]

Yes, the toolbox is 2004 format. I remember the toolbox going through a conversion process when we did the 2004 install. We had this problem in 2003 and were hoping the move to 2004 would fix it. No such luck. Our current tool box version is 12.0.0

 

[Mandrake22]

Toolbox doesn't give us any trouble. But then we only use it to create the item the first time. We then save the part with our semi-intelligent part number and from that point on insert them like any other part. We also delete all of the configurations except the one we want. We don't use smart fasteners.

 

[Casey96SS]

We have made the standard toolbox work pretty well with our system. We enter the p/n and descr in the configuration properties each time we insert a new fastener/create a new configuration. This works well with the BOM and all the info is retained next time we insert the fastner.

Our main problem is actually being able to use the toolbox. It is very slow and using it with multiple users is a joke even with all the settings set correctly.