AutoCad 2010 LT - Slow and crashes

[Anonymous]

Hi All,

Thank you in advance for reading.

We are currently having an issue with AutoCad 2010 LT.  Its running on a HP Machine with a 2.6Ghz CPU and 4GB of RAM (Windows 7 Pro 64-bit).  Every now and then the program locks up and crashes.  It can be totally random.  The last time it crashed the user wasn't even on the PC, it just said not responding.

Also, we have also found that when changing the printer settings it causes the program to crash.  Our IT has already changed the driver and pointer it directly at the printer using the IP address.

Can anyone offer any suggestions on how we can stop CAD from doing this?

A few more details:

- Nothing showing in any of the event logs

- It can happen on small and large documents

- It happens randomly, the user can be doing anything

- The Graphics Card is fully up to date (ATI 3000 series)

- No relivent updates have been installed recently.

- Anti Virus (MSE) has been setup not to scan CAD files.

Kind Regards,

Scorpeo

[pendean]

AutoCAD randomly crashes: fact.

Windows randomly hangs, and you may think it crashed: fact.

There is no cure for "randomly occuring": fact. To find a cure, you have to be able to do it on demand all the time.

"not responding" is not a crash, that's a busy application doing something and Windows 7 is letting you know you need to wait for it to finish. What is it doing? I have no idea, you need to get some type of monitoring software and see what is going on behind your display. Or AutoCAD can't find something it needs and is busy hunting for it.

I'm not sure about your second issue: what "printer settings", which printers, can you do it on demand or is it also random, and what did IT change exactly and how are you set up in AutoCAd to print/plot?

[Anonymous]

Firstly, thank you for your reply.

Can you recommend some monitoring software?  We have been monitoring the RAM and CPU usage but there is still plrenty off free resources when it does 'not respond'.

All random occurances are normally done by triggers.  Are there any logs that AutoCad keep for when it does crash?  Any log files that we can view at all?

Would you recommend a re-install/repair? 

The second issue:
Its a HP 500 Plus Plotter with a Network card. The problem is again at random. 

IT did some cleanup operations on the PC, changed the printer driver to various ones, updated the Graphics Drivers.  AutoCad is setup to plot to the HP 500 Printer.  Auto selects tray1.  The settings that the user changes is fit to page.

[pendean]

Print-Plot forum:

http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/Printing-and-Plotting/bd-p/30

[DominicBlomfield8733]

Biggest cause we have found of slow AutoCAD and crashes is buggy network connection.

If you are on a network try running the buggy machine with all drawings on machine and no network connection (sorry no printing) for 1 day. If it still does then its the machine/ install and could be memory card fault, software clash, thermal creap, fan on graphics card not working properly, a lot of things.

If the network then make sure the machines network card and router/ switch are all aligned (auto neg etc) and, believe this, once it was a loose floor network socket! Also if there is 3rd P software running the network card (not windows drivers) make sure the software and the windows settings are aligned. Auto detect on 3rd P software can change settings on the fly and trip up lots of things.