Drawing Blocks moving very slowly

I cannot figure out why after moving from Solidworks 2006 to 2008,
moving several blocks in a drawing goes very slowly. When blocks are
selected and the move command is selected the blocks stay pink or
light blue and slowly turn black until it finally lets me select a
point to perform the move. It always worked very quickly in 2006.
Anyone have any ideas? I do all my electrical drawings in Solidworks,
and they worked good in 2006, but are now very slow to move or copy.

Thanks,

 

Post your system specs.. 2006 to 2008 is a big jump as far as the amount
of resources needed to have a good experience..

 

It does the same thing on the new Dell Workstations that we bought
recently that have way better specs, but mine is a

Processor Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T7500 @ 2.20GHz
Processor Speed 2.14 GHz
Memory (RAM) 2048 MB
Operating System Microsoft Windows XP Professional
NVIDIA QUATRO FX360M

 

I'm guessing thats a laptop?

I would go ahead and max out your RAM, turn the 3GB switch on, and check
your pagefile settings (set the min and max to the same number, I
normally set it to 1.5-2.5x the amount of RAM I have)

RAM is cheap enough these days, tho thats probably not your problem.

You have a decent CPU, so the only other thing I would try is different
driver versions.

As for the Dells, I would get the recommended driver from SolidWorks

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

search for your dell system there..

 

Actually I JUST read something that said that with 4gb of ram on a 32bit
system (the max allowed) that a pagefile will actually slow down the
system.. I'll try it out and post back my results..

 

I just have to think that this is either a solidworks option causing
the problem or the new way that solidworks treats blocks is slower.
It seems that a lot of the handling of blocks changed and something
slowed the use of them way down.

I thought that maybe it was because my blocks were saved in Solidworks
2006, and Solidworks 2008 never asks me to save them as Solidworks
2008, like it would if you were opening a part. I tried resaving some
of my blocks after opening them in 2008 and that didn't seam to make a
difference.

I would think that a block should be one of the easiest things for CAD
software to do. I mean, it is only a little sketch and multiple
copies of it. I open a fairly large assembly with lots of bolts, etc,
and rotate the thing around, copy parts, and everything works great
and fast, but it takes forever to move simple little blocks.

Has anyone else had this happen?

 

I've been using since 2007, and running 2009 atm, never had any problems
with blocks.

now, just wondering, did you update to 2008, or do a fresh install?

did you heed my advice and check your driver versions? You didn't
mention it above..

Have you contacted your VAR about this problem also, it never hurts to
have an extra couple eyes trying to figure out a problem.

 

I tried the new drivers, which didn't do anything. However, when I
look up my graphincs card they have a driver listed for performance
for AutoCAD 2008, that says on some functions should speed it up 10x.
I thought I would give it a try, but it kept telling me that it
couldn't find AutoCAD 2008 on my PC, which I do have installed. So I
didn't get to try that one out, but I just loaded the regular driver,
and nothing seems any different.

I wish I knew how to make a movie of it happening, because it is
really weird. I select multiple blocks and then the copy command, and
solidworks puts a blue dot everywhere the individual blocks insertion
points are and it turns all the text pink and all the lines blue, and
then slowly starts dropping the blue dots and turning the lines into
black until it finally turns everything blue and lets me select a
point to offset by. I am not sure what it is trying to figure out.

 

I called support and they told me that this is normal Solidworks
behavior. If the entities are selected, then Move command is
executed, Solidworks has to figure out which blocks are within the
selected entities, and they move slow. If you pick the Move command
first, then solidworks just selects the items as blocks and they move
a lot faster. I am so used to selecting all the entities first, that
it is going to take some getting used to.

Thanks for the replies.