crash and burn
July 1, 2009 11 Comments
Last year the company that I work for decided to begin the process of upgrading the engineering department computers to more of a CAD workstation. Being the CAD Administrator and the IT department I had the privilege (so I thought) of being #1 on the list to receive the first machine that was purchased. So after some investigation we ordered and received a Dell Precision T3400 desktop workstation, Microsoft Vista 64bit, 8GB RAM, 250GB Hard Drive, nVidia 1700 graphics card, and Microsoft Office 2007.
When I received the new machine I immediately downloaded SolidWorks 2008 and it ran perfect to my delight. I was extremely happy with my new machine and had no issues, not even with Vista. Around September or October of 2008 I installed SolidWorks 2009 SP0 and this is when the wheels fell off. Crashes, crashes and more crashes. Not with SolidWorks however but with Microsoft Office 2007. Random crashes would occur which is even worse because it is hard to pinpoint the cause of these. One thing I did notice however is that I would only experience crashes if SolidWorks 2009 was running or had been running in that session. Outlook, Word and Excel are almost unusable while SolidWorks is loaded into memory. This caused and is causing much frustration on my end and also my employers end because of constant rebooting in order to clear the system.
I recently have begun hearing from other users that are experiencing the same problem, which makes me feel a little bit better in a sick and twisted kind of way, because at least it is a known problem and it isn’t just me. I wanted to let some of you, my readers, know about this as well so that in case you are experiencing this same problem there are some different forums and discussions going on about this.
Here is a list of forum discussions that have been started about this.
http://forum.solidworks.com/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=12&threadid=21048
And also a Knowledge Base SPR# for this same thing.
So I guess here is my question to SolidWorks. How can I know that this is not a SPR that is just going to sit idle. If you are a SolidWorks employee that is working on this or know of one that is I would love to talk to them to get an updated status of this SPR because the status of “Open” in the Knowledge Base does not help me out at all. If you are a fellow SolidWorks user that is or was experiencing the same thing please leave a comment and let me know what you are doing as a work around for this.
I do not mean for this blog to become a source of this type of posts but I thought that it was important to inform other users that are seeing the same thing and to let SolidWorks know that it is a VERY IMPORTANT issue to get fixed.
Hi Jason-
Sorry to hear about your crashes. I’m still using Office 2003, so I haven’t experienced this problem.
Devon
hey devon! i hope all has been going well.
this problem is extremely frustrating because i have come to the conclusion that it is only a problem if you have all of the 6-8 different hardware/software options installed and go figure, i have them all. hopefully i will get some response from solidworks on this.
Jason,
I’m right there with ya Buddy! My system has some serious Office 2007 stability issues and my co-worker’s T3400 (which is VERY similar to yours) has the same issue.
I have noticed that it seems to happen when SolidWorks is open but haven’t had time to look into this further. Thanks for posting this!!!
Let’s hope that SolidWorks gets on the ball and looks into this quickly. To me, this SPR is big enough to warrant an early service pack release.
Ricky Jordan
hey ricky, it is really frustrating. if you ever get a chance to look at it and find something out please let me know.
wow, I’m now glad I don’t have MSOffice2007, but also sad I don’t have a newer setup. hope you find out what’s going on Jason.
hey josh, ms office 2007 is really nice. i have it on my laptop with solidworks 2009 and have no problems. it is just a freak combination of like 6-8 things that causes these nightmares. frustrating!
Jason, you are not alone by any means. We have three machines here…two that have the crash more often than the other. All three are running office 07, with SW09 sp3 on Vista 64. None of our XP 32bit machines have this issue with office 07.
thanks for the comment. after i posted this i have found out that it is a pretty common problem that a lot of people are experiencing. i believe it is only a vista 64bit problem as i run vista 32bit on my laptop with office 2007 and have no problems.
hopefully solidworks is doing something about this and there is a fix SOON!
Jason,
Wow…I feel your pain. I have a Dell Precision T5400 with Vista64 sp3, nVidia FX3700, 8G ram, Office07. We started out with SolidWorks 08 and had minimal issues but when we upgraded to SW09 in May 09 that is when the crashing started. Waiting patiently on SolidWorks.
Hi,
I am a SolidWorks Application Engineer working for Solidtec Solutions Pty Ltd in Adelaide, South Australia. http://www.solidtec.com.au.
I was not aware of this problem untill yesterday when a client contacte me about the status of SPR#484553.
Please see the following reply from SolidWorks relating to this issue.
“”"”Please refer the hotfix in KB article S-039735 attached to this SR.
Please ignore the KB article as it is not published at this stage. However please refer the attached the below write-up and hotfix attached to this SR. On downloading hotfix, rename the extension from .ex to .exe
The characteristics of this problem appear as:
“Application Error” events in the application event file.
The faulting module is ntdll.dll
The exception code is either 0xc0000374 or 0xc0000005.
Note that the exception code 0xc0000005 may have other causes than addressed here.
The faulting application might be any Mocrosoft office application including Outlook.exe and Excel.exe.
A problem has been identified and reported to our development department under SPR 484553.. A fix has been implemented for SolidWorks 2009 SP5 and Hotfix 484553 is available for customers installed with SolidWorks 2009 SP4. The Hotfix_484553.exe is attaached to this solution
To implement the hotfix run the program “HotFix_484553.exe” once on each Vista x64 machine installed with SolidWorks 2009 SP4.”"”"”"
I have searched for this KB article S-039735 and it has been updated this morning and the hot fix is available.
Regards
Gareth
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