Laptop freezes

I had a similar problem a few years ago, and found the fan on the CPU cooler had failed: when I worked the machine hard, the CPU overheated and locked up. Can you monitor stuff like CPU temp on the machine?

Could it be that you're keeping open too many windows while you're working? The ability to open and work in a lot of windows is one of the things you sacrifice with the non-workstation class of computer. And it doesn't have anything to do with the amount of video memory: OpenGL requires mimimal. It has to do with how the cards are configured so that one is gamer class and another, very similar gpu is cad class. Sometimes there are ways to, as they say, soft quadro a card which can turn on the advanced functionality in the driver. Or you may need a better, more appropriate driver. And then there's the question of how the OS utilizes memory when you are reaching the limits of RAM. Freezes are a tough thing to diagnose remotely from a very general description.

Thanks for your reply. I'll check that, thanks.

-Marc

Yep, I'm aware of these facts. I checked with the user and Pro/E wa the only software running, with one or two windows max. open at any time. It looks like it was an OpenGL call that made the card go nuts and and I hoped there was a software OpenGL mode in Pro/E like there is in SW. Thanks!

-Marc

There is and it's generally the default configuration setting: the GRAPHICS option set to OPENGL. The other value for this is WIN32_GDI which sometimes cures video problems like ghosting, incomplete screen resets, jerky model spinning, drawing items that drop off the page inexplicably when the graphics system has poor or incomplete support for OpenGL. I'm still not sure though that this will fix your user's problem. There are just so many flaky things that happen to computers with cards that are not supported/certified for use with Pro/e it's hard to say which could be causing this particular problem. For example, someone suggested, earlier this year in this NG, that setting the BIOS so that "AGP fastwrite" is disabled also helped with this kind of card. Seems like a crap shoot to me. Hopefully someone who's using this card on a laptop will reply and give the exactly right answer. -- David Janes

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Great! So where can I find this setting? How can I set it to use the WIN32_GDI? That's what I was asking for, WIN32_GDI is software OpenGL. The display pipeline is handled by a dll provided by Windows (and thus computed by the CPU) instead of being computed by a chip (generally a dedicated GPU and a lot faster) on the display adapter.

Thanks

-Marc

It is a config.pro option.

->Tools-> options

option graphics and the values can be opengl, win32_gdi, xwindows, starbase and xgl