In the Midwest this is the time of year that you begin to see more and more people outside working on their lawns, finishing outside projects that were started last fall, out for walks and so on. This is also the time that a lot lawn care businesses around here have begun what they call spring cleaning which consists of getting everything ready for the upcoming summer and fall, getting rid of all the "junk" that has accumulated over the winter and making sure that everything is in tip top shape.
Well as a CAD Administrator or just a SolidWorks user sometimes you too need to do a little spring cleaning of your computer system and CAD files. At the company I work for I recently created a low end PDM system and in the process of this I took on the task of doing some serious cleaning up of CAD files and other general business files. After doing this once I am hoping that I NEVER have to do this again. What a pain but then again this probably had not been done in over 5 years so it was well overdue. That is why if you put your mind to doing this every spring you can easily stay on top of it.
In the industry that we are in there is often a need to quickly create a sketch or model in order to quickly get 1 dimension. Sometimes these files get saved, sometimes not, sometimes saved in good places that will remind you to clean them up and sometimes in places that are in 5-10 folders deep that you happen to stumble across once or twice a year. This is partly a product of the industry we are in and partly a lack of discipline on us for not saving this in the right place or deleting them ourselves when we are finished with them. Anyways, all of these files are tying up network space or possibly space on your hard drive. That is why it is good to set up a schedule to go through your files and delete the dead weight files.
Another aspect of spring cleaning is basic computer maintenance. This includes cleaning out your temporary files, disk defragmenting, error checking and so on. There have been some great blog posts written lately that assist you in this.
Matt Lorono has done a awesome series called SolidWorks Performance Blitz! which covers a multitude of different things that you can do to clean up your system and then tips and tricks that you can do that will speed up your computer also. Here are the links to his 4 part series:
1. SolidWorks Performance Blitz! (Part 1: /3GB Switch)
2. SolidWorks Performance Blitz! (Part 2: Anti-Virus Tip/Trick)
3. SolidWorks Performance Blitz! (Part 3: Virtual Memory)
4. SolidWorks Performance Blitz! (Part 4: Computer Processor)
Ricky Jordan also recently did an article on the SolidWorks Rx 2008 tool that comes with SolidWorks. Inside this tool is a System Maintenance tab that assists you in cleaning up some of the temp files among other things.
All in all their are a lot of resources and programs that are available online that will help you clean up your computer and this is something that should be done on a regular basis. So set up a schedule, clean your system and purge the dead files off of your network. This will definately benefit you later on down the road if you have a clean system in place.
CALLING ALL MEMBERS OF THE SOLIDWORKS COMMUNITY!!!
Well as I posted this past weekend I was eagerly anticipating the arrival of the next addition to my book shelf. As I stated in my post 
more time before publishing as he put it “another scathing blog post”. Greg informed Matt that SolidWorks had decided to make all of the presentations available to everyone. But just in cased you really wanted to read Matt’s “scathing blog post”, he still posted it this at the bottom of his 
