Re: Slow mouse reactions on SW 2006

"The machine you spec'ed was bargain basement home internet box"

I don't mean to make this some sort of back and forth debate, but the fact
is those machine specs were the same if not BETTER that what Dell and HP set
for some of their "workstation class" computers and even some of their
eServers at the time. When SW came out to our site to demo there was a
salesman and person from Tech Support who performed the demo. I personally
asked what they required for hardware and the person who was from Tech
Support said "I am using a 1.2 GHz laptop with about 256MB of RAM for these
models". "These models" are generally the same models of our products that
they created for us to demo and the same products that we are working on
today with slightly different charactoristics. I doubt that Dell laptop had
anything better than an integrated 8-16MB video card..

Again, the problem isn't ATI who has been and remains totally reliable for
every other purpose and every other application that I have had for over the
past 8 years since I started using them (including previous SW versions).
Everyone here seems to confirm my suspicions that the problem really is that
the specs SW gives out at sales time are totally bogus and there is very
little effort to allow companies to effectively control their hardware
investments from version to version because they continually abandon
compatibility with some hardware to chase compatibility with the flavor of
the day.

One of the things that was in SW's favor when we decided to go with them is
that their cost and maintainance was within our budget. We pay about
$1200-$1500 per seat for maintainance each year and we assumed that our
natural hardware upgrade path would be accomidated, but from posts in this
forum it seems like hidden costs are more than double, if not triple. I am
being told that I need a $1000 video card now plus probably an extra GB of
RAM not to mention that my 6 month old system that runs number crunching
design simlulators like Ansys very well is now considered nothing more than
a "bargain basement internet box"?????

Just for my own future reference so I can accuratley budget my true costs
for Solidworks tell me if these numbers are correct for my yearly or
bi-yearly costs:

Maintenance per seat - ~ $1400
Brand New "workstation" - ~ $3000 every two years
Video card for "workstation" ~ $ 1000 every two years or year
IT Cost of implementing SW and new hardware ~ $750 every two

So with this numbers the best I should do is update SW every two years and
pay $2800 in maintenance and about $4000-$5000 for a new computer and setup.
That is about $3400 - $3900 per year on average to have SW. Unfortunately,
I still can't see a way around not knowing for sure if my video card will be
dropped next year or if my video card will be dropped just because of the
new version or SP for Windows.

"matt" <m_lombard@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:MPG.1e51c0edd915ea45989793@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx


How am I supposed to be able to
keep my systems up with certified cards other than dumb luck?


You're way overexaggerating. ATI has been bad for OpenGL apps since at
least 1999. Do a search on this newsgroup for Radeon, and it is reviled
as often as it is mentioned. nVidia has been good for SW as far back as
I've dealt with them. These things don't change from release to
release, although recommended driver versions do.

The machine you spec'ed was bargain basement home internet box, maybe ok
for casual gaming. A high end graphics card (nVidia Quadro FX 4400 for
$2000+) is way more money than what you paid for an entire computer with
specs like that. For reference, if you go to the www.Xicomputer.com
website and follow the link for the Mtower 64 SLI Workstation, the
starting price is $1059. It has a better processor (3800 instead of
3400) more ram (1 Gb instead of 512 k) better video (GeForce MX4000
instead of a Radeon, PCIe insted of AGP, and SLI capable to boot). You
could trade the 15" monitor that comes with it for a little extra hard
drive (only $25 to double the 80 Gb drive). So if we're generous, let's
say you have $1000 into the hardware. It's simply inadequate to run
SolidWorks.

I wouldn't jump on you like this except that you're trying to pin this
on SolidWorks, and the responsibility for your problem is clearly not
theirs. I'm all for letting them know when there's a problem, but this
isn't one of those times. You sound like an IT person who got caught
not paying attention.


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