So I know who the special guest at SolidWorks World 2009 is going to be. And you don’t. At least, not yet.

But you will soon.

Yep, this year we’re doing something different. Rather than making it a big surprise, we’re going to let you know who the guest speaker is in advance.

So here’s what I’ll do. If you’re the first person to guess correctly between now and the time we announce it, I’ll send you something nice. Post your guess in this comments section. Maybe you’ll get lucky.

Here’s a hint: The person is on this list

Matthew West,
Social Media Manager, SolidWorks

Working on Intercad’s Technical Support team you come across many customers that sometimes just seem to struggle with the performance of their machine(s) and as SolidWorks adds greater value to the product each year this performance appears to go downhill… Not true!

I’d have to say nearly 80% of SolidWorks performance related issues are the blame of an incompatible video card or just the video driver. As SolidWorks is so reliant on the openGL functionality of your video card having the right hardware and configuration is critical, the right hardware or driver can give you either a good or bad experience with CAD software. To aid this SolidWorks produce their own drivers which are available on their website at www.solidworks.com if you have not checked your video driver for updates in the last 6 months please do. The drivers can be filtered on the site by Vendor (please also note that DELL and HP are also listed as cards for these systems are specific to DELL and HP configurations) SolidWorks version and system can also be filtered.

Not only hardware and drivers but your workflow may just need updating…

With each new version of SolidWorks there are many new features, many of which are customer driven enhancements. With these new features the software inevitably becomes larger, this will lead to you more than likely requiring an update yourself! In the past few releases SolidWorks has added many performance enhancements to assist you in getting the most out of you currant system. SolidWorks prides itself in the customer not having to constantly upgrade their hardware, so performance enhancements like SpeedPak, greater functionality in Lightweight mode, and Large Assembly Modes are added to assist you.

In the recent release of SolidWorks 2009 there have been many fantastic performance related enhancements, one of which I have noticed is in the drawing views. As you zoom in and out SolidWorks is adding view detail as you zoom in, this means that when you are just looking at the sheet from a page fit perspective not every little piece of data is loaded into the views leaving greater RAM space. This feature has been added to improve dynamic display speed and generation of drawing views.

The new SpeedPak functionality is brilliant offering you the ability to insert large sub-assemblies into an even larger top level assembly, not only this but all you BOM and annotation features are still available. SpeedPak allows you to generate drawings of large assemblies quicker than ever before. Another fantastic feature of the SpeedPak is you can email only the assembly file and not all the references as all the reference information is added to the file when you generate the SpeedPak.

Other features like “Quick View/Selective Open”, Display States and the ability to load specified drawing sheets have been added in SolidWorks 2009, this giving you the ability to only load 1 or 2 sheets of a large drawing file, maybe just to make a minor adjustment, save as PDF or print.

To summarise the above, SolidWorks has so many great performance enhancing features with every new release that it can be hard to keep track of them all in our little worlds. SolidWorks together with Intercad and other vendors all over the world have put together Innovation Days that you can attend to gain this vital information. So don’t get left behind with this extremely fast paced developing software and get along to one of these events, also take the opportunity to speak with Technical Support staff and SolidWorks affiliates from around the globe!

Don’t get left behind, finding yourself using SolidWorks 2009 with your old 2003 techniques!

Watch this space for more…

Micah Speight
Intercad Pty Limited., www.intercad.com.au
Authorized Solidworks Reseller in Autralia & New Zealand

A quick note to announce that the SolidWorks World 2009 website is up! The upcoming biggest 3D CAD event will be held in sunny Orlando, Florida! Don’t miss this great opportunity to meet up with the SolidWorks community. Visit the website.