AutoCAD Electrical

[#1]

I was told that ACE 2013 has issues on Win 7 64 bit OS and that they "should". Also there seems to be an issue when saving drawings in 2000 format. 

[#2]

Yes, probably should have mentioned it's Win7 64 bit SP1, fully patched to latest updates from Microsoft.

[#3]

I'm running AutoCAD Electrical 2013 on Win 7 64-bit SP1 with 8GB of RAM and I have not had a crash.  There must be some specific workflow that produces the crash but I cannot make it happen.  Strange...I believe you but I cannot reproduce the crash.

[#4]

Yeah, it must be something specific about certain setups, if it was happening to lots of people on a regular basis there would be a bit more moaning on the groups I guess.  There's not really any workflow involved when I get the most common crash, it's immediately after I open the first drawing of a session, at the point where it's fully drawn on the screen but before I can do anything with it or even move the mouse.  It doesn't happen all the time, and seems to happen mostly after Autocad is first bought up after a long time not being used, either over a machine sleep cycle or if I've been doing something else non-Autocad for a while, but that might just be a red herring.  It has never as far as I'm aware occurred on the second start of Autocad after the first crash, and I have been careful to follow exactly the same procedure for the second restart.  I did wonder if it was a dll error, only happening when a dll had been removed from memory by windows after not being used for a long time perhaps.

My next step was going to be to uninstall my 3dconnexion driver and see if that made any difference (don't use the 3dmouse with Electrical).  However probably not, because I installed a driver update the other day and it didn't make any difference, but that's my next step anyway.

Trevor

[#5]

One other thing which we noticed is that on the network licence seats it crashes more often than on the local livence ones. The other thing which will make a difference for this: disable the Aero theme in Win 7 (which gives you the nice preview on the taskbar) and also be sure that you have the latest video driver for your card.

[#6]

Make sure you have the latest driver for your video card, or, if you have updated the driver recently try rolling it back.  You might also try disabling hardware acceleration.  At the lower right of the AutoCAD Electrical screen is an icon that looks like an IC chip with a light bulb next to it.  Hover over it and see if hardware acceleration is enabled.  Try disabling it if so.  You won't see any appreciable difference in performance.  This is just a hunch but certain video cards/drivers produce unexpected results with certain software.  My old IBM Thinkpad had errors with 32-bit AutoCAD Electrical, any version, if I had hardware acceleration enabled.  It mostly occurred when trying to create a multi-level terminal association with Terminal Strip Editor.  It would produce a "Heidi driver" error.  This is usually caused by trying to use hardware acceleration with a video card/driver that isn't completely compatible with the AutoCAD engine that runs underneath Electrical.

[#7]

OK, I've turned off hardware acceleration.  I'll report back if there is any difference, but to have much idea it will take a couple of days because once it's working it's generally fine for the rest of the session or the day.

For the record I have an nVidia Quadro 4000M in a Dell Precision M6600.  Rebuilt a couple of months ago with the latest video drivers at the time, don't think I've updated them since.  Didn't use 2013 with the previous build, was still using 2010.

Trevor

[#8]

Hah, unfortunately no difference (having disabled hardware acelleration), although this time the crash came just after opening a drawing in the usual manner, but it was not the first drawing of a session.  "FATAL ERROR: Unhandled Access Violation reading 0x0001 Exception at fe5812b9h"  Nothing like mixing hex formats in the same error message

[#9]

Try opening one of the drawings from the demo project that ships with the software first.  See if you can get a crash with one of those drawings.

[#10]

OK, I've tried and opened many of the files from the demo projects and not had a crash.  I have also specially opened them first in each session of using Autocad, and not had a crash yet.  That may or may not be significant, because I've only opened two or three new sessions since I started doing that, and it might be that it wouldn't have crashed anyway.  However I will continue to do that (open a demo first) and see what happens over the next few days.

Are you thinking that there might be a problem of some kind with the template I use?  I mentioned earlier that there was a logo missing off one file's border (part of the template) and also someone else mentioned that too.  The template is probably unchanged since it was last modified with ACE 2010 some time ago.  Is it worth doing something with that, even if only re-saving it in 2013 format?

Trevor