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Why Does My System Crash All the Time?

Question asked by Tim Schank on Sep 22, 2010
Latest reply on Nov 12, 2010 by Russ Johnston

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I've been frustarated with my system from day 1. I average about 2 SW crashes per day and its slow all the time. Most assemblies are small 10-50 parts. Might see 200 max. I've had my system "rebuilt" - OS re-installed by our IT department and I've installed and re-installed SW a few times. I'm trying to get approval for a new machine, but we lease Dell's and I maybe stuck with it for another 18 months. I don't have any issues with other programs crashing.

My specs are as follows:

Dell T7400

Windows XP SP 3

SW 2010 SP2.1

Dual E4505 Xeon processors (2.0 GHz)

4 Gb RAM

Nvidia Quadro FX 3700

My company is hessitant to go to 64 bit. Is that what I need along with more ram?

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Anna Wood Sep 22, 2010 11:19 PM
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Your computer is always going to be slow. 2 cpu's at the slowest clock speed is not a good configuration for speed in SolidWorks. You are better off with a single high Ghz CPU. Something in the 3 Ghz or above range. I would see about replacing your CPU with a single CPU of high clock speed. It can be multiple cores, needs to be a much higher clock speed. Do you have an approved video card driver for your system, running SW2010? To give you an idea of where your computer stands for speed check out the benchmarks I have on my website in the right sidebar. www.solidmuse.com. The punch holder benchmark has a Google spreadsheet of results for several hundred systems. You really have spent a ton of money on a system that is spec'ed wrong for the type of work you do. Unless, the Dell guys gave you a great deal on what you thought was a hot system. Dell does that when they are clearing out old stock. Many buyers get burned by this.
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David Paulson Sep 23, 2010 1:47 AM
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Tim,

The build on your computer has similitaries to mine. I have one E5440 Xeon quad core processor (2.83 MHz) , 8 GB RAM and a FX3700 video card. I built this system originally with XP as the operating system. I have experienced remarkably few crashes with this configuration. But I am still on SW 2009........... Anna offered some very worthwhile suggestions that you should check out.

But I think that 4 GB of RAM is too low for SW 2010. Windows operating systems like to juggle memory (virtual memory, etc.) in an effort to minimize the hardware requirement for applications. I have a new laptop with 10 GB RAM and it is amazing how it will use 3+ GB of memory without SW even being loaded. And to increase your memory you need to have an x64 bit operating system. With 8 or 10 GB RAM minimum I can set my page file to 0 and hopefully eliminate all of the software juggling that the OS will try to do with your memory. In my opinion most crashes in SW happen when memory resources are low.
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1-98QLGO Sep 23, 2010 4:25 AM
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You need to start doing a little detective work to figure out when and why the program crashes. My guess is that it is memory / 32 bit operating system related. In order to check this, make sure you monitor how much memory your system uses. Even if you get up to around 1,7 GB, you could be in dangerous territory and SW could crash: it depends a lot on your system configuration: how much memory your graphics card uses, whether or not you have the /3GB switch enabled, etc.

When I have users who are getting a lot of crashes, I ask them to write down the crashes in an excel file with the following information:
Date, time, what they did, what they were working on, the graphics card, the graphics driver, the version of solidworks, and the user. See the image and you get the idea. In your case, I would also want to know about how much ram you think was occupied by your system. That is why you are going to start to have to monitor your system resources more carefully.

You can see that I had one user who had 7 crashes in one day. I looked at the excel file and noticed that he hadn't gotten the latest service pack. After getting the latest service pack, he went to having one crash every few days instead.
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- Tim Schank @ 1-98QLGO on Sep 23, 2010 12:18 PM
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  Thanks for all the helpful input. I did run Anna's Punch Holder a few weeks ago. 156 secs. I'm on the google doc list username UTBTS. I'll pass your responses onto our IT group. I have tracked my crash log for a few weeks but haven't kept a close eye on the memory. With solidworks open right now I have 2.2mb available. Swapping out the processors on a leased machine or even add more memory may not be allowed under Dell's lease agreement. The solution will probably be to pass my system onto someone else and order a new one for me, but I may want to wait until it can be set up with windows 7. I'll have to see if they can allow me to be a beta tester.
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  - Anna Wood @ Tim Schank on Sep 23, 2010 1:31 PM
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    If you do get a new system, let us see what you spec'ed out before you buy/lease. We can give you advice on what IT thinks they want to give you and if it is a good system.
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Russ Johnston Nov 12, 2010 3:08 PM
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In my experience the Top 2 cause of SolidWorks crashes is poor system maintenance and bad modeling habits. I have 6 designers in my office. We are all running SolidWorks on identical systems. Some of them crash several times a day, while myself, I might crash once a month. Crashes caused by bad modeling habits are really hard to diagnose unless you are willing to sit next to someone all day and watch what they do. Crashes do to poor system maintenance are easy to fix. I use two different programs to maintain my system. The first is called Advanced System Care. It is available for FREE from www.iobit.com. You can pay for the full version if you want, but the free version works just as well. The second program I use is called CCleaner. It is available for FREE from www.piriform.com. This one allows you to set specific directories to clean out. You need to add "C:\Temp" and "C:\Users\yourname\AppData\Local\Temp" for Windows7 and "C:\Documents and Settings\rjohnston\Local Settings\Temp" for WindowsXP under "Options">"Include".
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Why Does My System Crash All the Time?

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