What is the 3 gig switch and can MS address a 9 gig swap file?

I was just upgrades to 3 gigs, due an assembly drawing which sent me to 1.37
gigs. It caused my old 1 gig machine to die. Anyway, can someone tell me
if it will do me any good to have a 3 x's swap file set (i.e. 9 gigs) or can
MS even address it? What should I do?

My other question is do I need to do anything to get MS use all three gigs.
The machine recognized it fine? I'm just asking because until recently I
never needed to know and didn't pay attention when it was discussed.

Thanks for the help,

Tom

 

Pentium 4 has 32 bits addresses that can access an absolute maximum of 4
Gigabytes.
So first, a swap file larger than 4Gb minus your ram size won't help.
Normally, Windows reserves 2Gb for its own use (!!!) and kindly leaves 2Gb
to applications. SolidWorks 2004 can now use 3Gb (and leave only 1 to
Windows...) but I couldn't find if you have to set an option or if it is
automatic...

 

Tom,

At a previous place I was doing large assemblies (~1.5GB) on a 2GB machine
and constantly had 'out of resource' issues with 2001+, 2003 and 2004,
especially when making cropped and section views of said large assemblies.
The swap file will not come into play unless you are using WinXP and use the
/3GB switch in your boot.ini file. This will allow SolidWorks, supposedly,
to go into swap. Unfortunately, I was only using Win2000. I had my swap set
up as 4GB and SolidWorks never used it one bit... it always crashed. I went
round and round with this one for over a year and never really got a
solution or recognition so I simply gave up (even cut and pasted SW screen
shots into AutoCAD to get a drawing done). It seems to me that they want to
believe it's operator error, but the more I read this newsgroup the more I
believe it is a core code problem that they, SolidWorks, don't want to
recognize as being an issue. It baffles me that they have the nerve to
advertise 10,000+ part assemblies, unprecedented large assembly management,
and we have a user with a 100,000+ part assembly....BS! Oh wait, I forgot
their Marketing tactic. You can open the large assembly, but thats about it.
Looks good in the demo. Did you ever notice that you never see pictures of
large assemblies on any of their boxes, manuals, etc. Hmmmm.

As far as your concerns, if you are using Windows XP I don't think there is
anything special you need to do other than if you start hitting swap, trying
the /3GB switch. I'm not 100% sure on what the limitations of Win2000 are.

 

Jeff,

Thanks,

You're exactly right. It's the drawings that send the system "out to
lunch". I had to strip the drawings to minimum views and make multiple
drawings.

No multiple sheet drawings allowed!!!!

Tom