SW 2009 SP5 Very slow on fast machine

[elripster]

I have SW 2009 SP5 on an HP PDX18T, Centrino 2 (4 CPU's), 4 gigs of DDR3 RAM, 64 Bit Win 7, Nvidia card, yada yada...

Solidworks will sit there with the little circle spinning (Computer thinking) with little to no CPU usage and only say 2 gigs or so of RAM used up every time I do things like delete a sketch, change the name of a part, exit out of a sketch, and other times.

It's like the computer is waiting for something else?

I have the machine set for performance, none of the visual effects are enabled, the program decides the hardware acceleration. The parts are set to lightweight or suppressed when not in use.

Any ideas on how to speed this up?

Frank

 

[ctopher]

Does the video card meet the requirements?

http://www.solidworks.com/sw/support/videocardtesting.html

Chris
SolidWorks 09 SP4.1
ctopher's home
SolidWorks Legion

 

[AnnaWood]

You have a HDX18T not a PDX18T. This was designed as an entertainment and multi-media computer.

http://h71036.

http://www7.hp.com/hho/us/en/pclc/articles/series-hdx-notebook-pc.html

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2330439,00.asp

What specific model cpu do you have? CPU is everything for SolidWorks speed.

I do not beleive you have a quad core cpu. That laptop was sold with Core 2 Duo's.

It has a GeForce 8600M GT video card. There will not be a video card driver for it in the SolidWorks approved graphics card list.

What video card driver version do you have installed on it? Is it from the HP website or the Nvidia website?

Have you used previous version of SolidWorks on this computer? How did they perform?

What else do you have installed on the computer? What other programs are running when you are using SolidWorks? Are you using your computer as a radio by streaming music while working in SolidWorks?

How big and feature rich are the models you are working on?

Is this your full time SolidWorks computer or a gamer machine that you use with SolidWorks every once in a while?

Your computer will not be a screamer but I would expect it to run SolidWorks reasonably well.

Need more details for the folks here to help you out.

Cheers,





Anna Wood
Core i7 EE965, FirePro V8700, 12 Gb RAM, OCZ Vertex 120 Gb SSD, Dell 3008WFP 30" Monitor
SW2010 SP2ev, Windows 7

http://www.solidmuse.com

http://www.phxswug.com

 

[elripster]

You are correct on the model, sorry for the typo.

I have the GForce GT 130M card. The driver version is 186.44.

The device manager lists Intel Core2 Quad Q9000 @ 2 GHz 4 times. Not sure if that is the 2 duos or not.

I had 2009 of an earlier service pack for a short while and the computer seemed to really fly compared to my old one.

I use this for Solidworks and word processing mainly, no gaming. I have Office on here, a sound recording program as well (do some light recording with this computer). I have TrendMicro for AV.

Definitely no streaming anything while using SW. I'm trying to save CPU for SW (although the computer is runnig slow with little to no CPU usage in the task manager).

Oddly, there seems to be heavy network traffic due to SW even though my files are on my harddisk as is SW.

Thanks for the help!

Frank

 

[handleman]

So what happens if you run SW with your network adapter disabled?

-handleman, CSWP (The new, easy test)

 

[AnnaWood]

OK you have a quad core cpu. Thanks for posting the model number.

Here is a bit of info on where your processor speed falls.

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_lookup.php?cpu=Intel+Core2+Quad+Q9000+@+2.00GHz

Also here is a link with info on your gpu.

http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GT-130M.13789.0.html

What other background services are running. Like Windows Defender, Windows Desktop Search, etc. Turn them off.

I would disable the network adapter as Handleman suggests to see if that helps.

I would enable the Windows Aero Theme. SolidWorks does use Windows Aero features in the graphics area.

I would also disable your anti-virus too as a check.

You may also want to look at the Windows 7 Tweak Guide so you really get a good understanding of your OS. It is worth the small amount the author is charging for the guides.

http://www.tweakguides.com/TGTC.html

It is hard to know if your computer is running slow or it is just as fast as it is going to be for the hardware you have without sitting in front of it myself.

Your system is towards the lower end for speed in terms of hardware selection. I am thinking the GeForce video may be causing you some issues. It is a crap shoot whether non-approved video cards will work well with SolidWorks. Some do, some don't.

Wish I could offer more advice.

Cheers,





Anna Wood
Core i7 EE965, FirePro V8700, 12 Gb RAM, OCZ Vertex 120 Gb SSD, Dell 3008WFP 30" Monitor
SW2010 SP2ev, Windows 7

http://www.solidmuse.com

http://www.phxswug.com

 

[elripster]

I can't turn turn the network off, well at least not for very long, because my installation uses a remote licese. I should have mentioned that.

That said, when I do turn it off and on SW gives me that "Close program or wait for response" window. Why that is I don't know.

It does seam though that when I disconnect then connect the network (wireless) that SW sort of wakes up.

I can spin stuff very smoothly and it flies doing FEA, it just seems to pause for no obvious reason. When it does this there is no hard drive or CPU activity, just network activity. Very strange.

I appreciate the help. I might see if I can isntall my SW on my work computer for camparison. It's a Dell MP4400 with 8 gigs of rame and a core 2 duo just to see how it goes.

Frank

 

[CorBlimeyLimey]

Check whether the hprblog.exe process is running when you experience the slowness.

http://h30434.

http://www3.hp.com/t5/Printer-All-in-One-Software-and/hprblog-exe/m-p/19174

 

[elripster]

I just went from sp5 to sp 4.1 and saw a big improvement in performance. Not sure what that means but figured I'd share.

Frank

 

[elripster]

Ok so check this out. I have SW 4.1 and SW 5.1 on the computer I desribed above as well as my work laptop that (Dell Precision m4400, 3 GHz Core 2 Duo, 8Gb ram, NVidia... very fast). In both cases, the computers are perfect with 4.1 and crippled with 5.1 (64 bit).

You click to start to sketch, sit for 2-3 minutes, draw a square, again 2-3 minuts, add a dimension... my work computer is using less than 3Gb of 8 right now and the CPU is almost flat while the computer is idling along.

I'm stumped as to what could cause this? I'd just use 4.1 but there seems to be a bug there when I try to run FEA (some file sharing issue) that is fixed in 5.1.

Frank

 

[CorBlimeyLimey]

The following may have nothing to do with the slowness in SP5.1, but in

https://forum.solidworks.com/docs/DOC-1014

it states;

Do not run multiple services packs of the same version on the same computer, this is a bad practice and can cause issues and SolidWorks will block this at some point in the future.

 

[elripster]

Saw that. For my test I rant 4.1 alone. Then 5.1 alone. I just reinstalled 4.1 again and am going to try to keep them both so I can have speed for modeling (4.1) but use 5.1 for FEA. We'll see if that works.

Frank