Poor performance Caused by system or program?

[Steve030373]

I have been running civil 3d 2011 on my machine at work now since march 2010 and I have no end of problems with it. it is crashing 2-3 times a day. I'm trying to get this problem resolved with our IT department. They keep insisting it is a software problem and I'm sure it is a hardware issue. I've attached a jpeg of my system settings. I'm also running the latest version with all patches installed for Civil 3d 2011.

The Crashes vary but ther are three main types:

1) Screen becomes scrambled, and then a few minutes later, civil 3d crashes with the following message "Civil 3d had to unexpectedly close sorry for the inconvienience"

2) Entire system freezes everything stops working including Ctrl+Alt+Del must resort to manually powering down.

3) Spuratically Civil 3d refuses to print. I get the "Attempting to cancel print" message. The only way to be able to print after that is a full reboot.

These crashes can happen at any time. Switching between MS/PS, Zooming, Panning, Opening, Printing ect. with the simplest drawings(Just an image with text) or something more complicated with surfaces and contours. So I can't narrow it down to any one thing.

I don't want to think it is a software problem as I don't want to have to go back to version 2006! The last version installed on this machine. We re-installed 2011 on machine #1 but it made no difference. Then the IT department Replaced my original machine with a "new" (Re-built) system with exactly the same spec's as before. But I'm still having the same issues. Does any one have any ideas I need something to take to the IT guys here. Or I just keep banging my head against the wall! and not getting anywhere.

Thanks,

Steve

[Sinc]

Change to Win 7 x64.

[Steve030373]

That is what I would like to do however I'm told the rest of our company programs will not run on a 64bit system. Ans therfore they will not provide me with one.

[LisaPohlmeyer]

My IT dept told me the same thing and I said BS... I basically insisted that we needed this OS for productivity reasons and our CAD dept became the test case for the rest of the county.  So, we took our same boxes, Dell T3400, added 4Gb RAM (for 8 total) and reformatted our workstations with Win 7 64bit and have never looked back.  We haven't found an app yet that won't run with our system (except the new Map FDO connection to geodatabase).  Our workstations are much, MUCH more stable.  Our productivity has increased immensely and the tech support headaches that I used to have trying to help with XP issues have disappeared, thank goodness.  So, for us it all came down to productivity.  Did they want us losing billable hours (figuratively) having to recreate work, etc. or bite the bullet.  Sure, it took a couple of days to reinstall all the software and get it all tweaked, but I'm SOOOOOO glad we did.

Lisa Pohlmeyer

Williamson County, TX

[gccdaemon]

I'm having the same problem with the new sp1 civil3d 2011 and I'm on a new dell workstation with 6gig ram and quad xeon with win7 x 64. I think it may be an install issue. I'm going to attempt a repair and will repost if everything seems to run o.k.

[gccdaemon]

sorry...only having problems with number two. No issues with the other items listed.

[Neilw_05]

You will have to upgrade your machine and OS if you want to run 2011. It's just one of the costs of migrating to C3D.

[neilyj666]

I have a brand new Dell Precision T5500, 8Gb Ram, Win 7 x64 and C3D 2011 and am less than impressed with the performance.

As the OP said C3D just seems to be Not Responding or randomly crashing and generating CER's to send to Autodesk. I have read other posts that suggest C3D will start to respond after a time but who has time to wait??

Saying that, other programs (Excel, Outlook) also exhibit this Not Responding behaviour (i.e. program window sort of decreases in brightness) but they start to respond after a few seconds.

I have not been able to determin if it is a Windows/C3D/network problem

[michael.robertson]

Sounds like you may have a software problem, we ran into big performance problems with a certain version of Symantec (Norton) Antivirus basically killing our machines as far a usability (hangs, delays, lock ups).

Civil3D is really designed around using Windows 7 64bit and it has been rock solid on our machines since the first betas came out.

[LisaPohlmeyer]

Michael,

I'll agree with that.  I worked with our IT department to write an exclusion list for our AV program (Kaspersky).  Once we got that done, all was fairly stable. I'm not saying I never have issues, but it's usually something that I'm trying to do that's pushing the app beyond it's limits.

[neilyj666]

I think the performance is so erratic i might have to do reinstall from scratch to see if that improves things - not responding at least a dozen times today so far

[gccdaemon]

Also make sure that you go into any xref base files and reset the scale list. I ran into problems with that converting files from civil 3d 2008.