SW2008-Installer

Had a rash of CTDT today on some simple stuff so it is time to
uninstall and reinstall or rather was. Uninstalling 2008 is not what
you would expect. If you have other things installed like eDrawings or
DWGEditor you have to uninstall the whole lot to get SW to uninstall.
This suggests that what is really showing up in "Add/Remove Programs"
is some kind of super installer, not the installer itself. And when
it is done it leaves a heck of a lot of garbage laying around, be it
folders or registry entries no longer needed. When it was done there
were a lot of problems with the machine. It's kind of like some bad
guests that when they leave, they leave the house a shambles.

I have some theories about why this is happening. For one, Symantec
Corporate AV is running and can't be shut off. Second, IT has a lot of
Group Policies going on that I am not privy to, but change the
characteristics of the machine. And finally SW is becoming less and
less hardware friendly. While SW is trying to find it's way on my
hardware the seat of NX I have is sitting there on the other screen
grinning and saying, "Come on SW, you can do it." Strangely NX shrugs
off the AV software and the GPs and just keeps tickin' while SW,
tempermental beast that it is, provides a wonderful user experience
right up to the RX prompt.

Oh well, tommorrow is another day.

TOP

PS

I decided to have another go at an Administrative image. Two and a
half hours later I was ready to install. About 1 minute into the
install it bombed with something about regedit. I wonder if anyone has
any thoughts about that?

 

Sorry to hear this :s

I just keep getting confirmed by the old rule of thumb, dont touch it
till SP 3

To try and "answer" some... I´ve been told that the image for 2008
dosnt work like the 2007 one, and you need to do a lot of tricks to
make it work. Since I wont install 2008 till at least SP 3, I havent
asked the list with those tricks from our VAR yet.. They do however
claim that it can work.
(I know this aint helping you a lot)

 

I came in this morning and got it to install. The IT-elf was working
on my box last night and I have to find out what he did.

What I did find this morning was that regedt32 was necessary to allow
SW to create certain keys. Permissions had to be set. regedt32 is
regedit on steroids and allows permission control and other things on
the registry. These were hit or miss changes on permissions for
certain folders in the software/solidworks tree as needed by the
installer.

Turning off the virus checker auto scan seems to be a real important
thing. In my case it is Symantec Corporate's autoscan including
network scan. I am seeing up to 85% network utilization after doing
this and it really speeds up creation of the image, or in this case
application of the service pack.

TOP

 

Paul,

That's because NX and Pro-E don't use the registry for EVERYTHING. They're
written to be platform independent at the source level, something SW would
have been wise to do years ago.

The windows registry based structure is probably the cause of 90% of the
problems with SW. Give me a couple config files to edit anyday. The registry
method SUCKS and always has, especially to the extent SW has taken it.


Mark

 

This isn't going to be much immediate help but I have lost more data
and have had more problems with Symantic Software. And this is
besides my system running like a slug with Norton AV. I now consider
it the "ultimate virus". Not only dies it do damage but the victims
actually pay for it. I tried to remove Norton AV on a machine once
and after days of fooling with it, it only took 20 minutes to boot
up. I ended up trashing the whole system. I have even reformated
HD's only to find out that Norton was still magically present.....
talk about a virus!

If you have Norton, I would not be complaining about SW having loading
problems. SW 2008 may or may not be the real problem.... good luck!

EdT

 

Compound this by the fact that there are actually two Norton/Symantec
AV products, one for consumers and one for corporate. The consumer
version is the one that behaves the most like a virus, and the
corporate edition just slows things down. I am dealing with corporate.
As I look in task manager RTSCAN generally has the highest CPU times
and the highest IO values next to SW. Turning it off during install
greatly increased the speed at which the administrative image was
built and installed itself.

A very good point was made in CAD Managers Boot Camp last year. If a
piece of software will not install properly when the AV software is
ACTIVE, then there is a PROBLEM with the software not the AV software
although I say this a bit tongue in cheek regarding Symantec.

When I last evaluated AV software I did something that you don't hear
much on this forum. I checked which AV software actually did the best
job protecting against viruses, worms and trojans. Although Symantec
was high on the list, Anti-Vir was even higher and did a better job at
catching new viruses. From my own experience Anti-Vir also runs better
with SW. But many IT people swear by Symantec so SW users have to live
with it.

TOP

 

That is a good point. And now that XML is well established why
couldn't SW do all that it does in the registry with an XML file(s).
From what I understand MSoft is moving away from compound files for
Word and Excel. That will leave SW an orphaned technology to reside in
in addition to the registry. We can only hope that SE or Inventor
touts using XML soon.

On my standalone laptop I didn't have any of these problems. So it is
pretty clear that SW installer is not playing well with IT's GPOs.

TOP

 

We have always used Sophos AV software. Besides getting high scores
for detection rates, it has never interfered with SWX.

Jim

 

It is time for management in corporations with SolidWorks to consider
shutting off the 3D design into an isolated workgroup without any
Internet or corporate mail & without all those corporate AV products,
and provide the users with a $500 PC for their other uses which is on
the corporate network.

Dealing with slowing down your most critical creative design workers
because they don't want to provide FAST and reasonably priced
solutions it just the pits. I can buy a cheapo HP or a good Intel Mac
Mini & setup WinXP (or Linux or BSD or...) on it and run whatever
needs to be done for $500-700, when I steal a spare small LCD,
keyboard & mouse from the bum box (or share a screen).

This blind-sided attitude that each user must have only one machine,
no matter how badly we have to cripple it, and then deal with much
time wasting on many levels for highly paid people which wastes more
time each quarter than the extra PC costs is absolutely ludicrous.

Sheesh - Bo