Laptop freezes

Hi all,
We have a laptop on which freezes after between 10 and 40 minutes of
Wildfire2 work. The laptop is not "workstation-class" and has a simple
ATI Mobility Radeon 9200.
I'm not a Pro/E user but I'm in charge of getting this duo to work. Any
setting in Pro/E or Windows or... that would help me? Is there a switch
that tells Pro/E to use software OpenGL?

Thanks,
Marc

 

I had a similar problem a few years ago, and found the fan on the CPU
cooler had failed: when I worked the machine hard, the CPU overheated
and locked up. Can you monitor stuff like CPU temp on the machine?

 

Could it be that you're keeping open too many windows while you're working? The
ability to open and work in a lot of windows is one of the things you sacrifice
with the non-workstation class of computer. And it doesn't have anything to do
with the amount of video memory: OpenGL requires mimimal. It has to do with how
the cards are configured so that one is gamer class and another, very similar gpu
is cad class. Sometimes there are ways to, as they say, soft quadro a card which
can turn on the advanced functionality in the driver. Or you may need a better,
more appropriate driver. And then there's the question of how the OS utilizes
memory when you are reaching the limits of RAM. Freezes are a tough thing to
diagnose remotely from a very general description.

 

Thanks for your reply.
I'll check that, thanks.
-Marc

 

Yep, I'm aware of these facts. I checked with the user and Pro/E wa the
only software running, with one or two windows max. open at any time.
It looks like it was an OpenGL call that made the card go nuts and and
I hoped there was a software OpenGL mode in Pro/E like there is in SW.
Thanks!

-Marc

--

 

There is and it's generally the default configuration setting: the GRAPHICS option
set to OPENGL. The other value for this is WIN32_GDI which sometimes cures video
problems like ghosting, incomplete screen resets, jerky model spinning, drawing
items that drop off the page inexplicably when the graphics system has poor or
incomplete support for OpenGL. I'm still not sure though that this will fix your
user's problem. There are just so many flaky things that happen to computers with
cards that are not supported/certified for use with Pro/e it's hard to say which
could be causing this particular problem. For example, someone suggested, earlier
this year in this NG, that setting the BIOS so that "AGP fastwrite" is disabled
also helped with this kind of card. Seems like a crap shoot to me. Hopefully
someone who's using this card on a laptop will reply and give the exactly right
answer.

 

David Janes wrote:

....

Great! So where can I find this setting? How can I set it to use the
WIN32_GDI?
That's what I was asking for, WIN32_GDI is software OpenGL. The display
pipeline is handled by a dll provided by Windows (and thus computed by
the CPU) instead of being computed by a chip (generally a dedicated GPU
and a lot faster) on the display adapter.

Thanks
-Marc

 

It is a config.pro option.

->Tools-> options

option graphics
and the values can be opengl, win32_gdi, xwindows, starbase and xgl