I'm sure many of you have been running your Solidworks Simulation Studies in the background while working on other things. I have done this many times with no issue. Lately when I have been trying to do this, the solver seems to stall. By this I mean that when looking at CPU, memory, and disk usage in the task manager, the solver no longer seems to be running. The memory usage will remain constant, but the CPU and disk usage becomes zero. In the Solidworks solver window, the memory usage shows a constant value, the convergence plot stops, and iteration information stays the same, but the solver still says that its running. 

Has anyone run into this issue? 

I seem to be able to get it running again by hitting pause and then restarting the study, but it only seems to keep going on its own if I stay on the solver window.

Also, during the simulation, the solver generally does not use all CPU capacity available, it seems to cycle between 15% and 80% utilization as it goes through an iteration. Is there a way to dedicate more CPU resources to speedup simulation?  Thank you for reading.