Dedicated SWX machine

Sounds like a plan.

I have a similar set up. A cheap home "multimedia" type box for internet, email, 300gb external backup drive, etc. A decent quality laptop which only uses email when I'm on the road, and a heavy duty CAD tower for serious stuff, and dual boot. They all can access the internet, but they only do it to update anti-virus and for some large FTP transfers.

I also use a KVM for 3 machines, but its all hardware, not a software switch.

I think it's a good idea to have two machines. If one goes down, you still need a way to get out. Also You need a place to test junkware, games, etc.

Brad wrote:

I prefer the Neitzche method: "If it doesn't kill me, it will make me stronger." I won't know if my computer is adequately protected unless I expose it to the Internet. Of course, you risk getting killed... I suspect that the best security precaution I've taken has been to not use IE.

I've been on the Internet for 10 years and have never had virus problems. I've had far more trouble with hardware and with personal stupidity.

You might want to firewall you machine. Not with Windows firewall but one you have some control over. Just poke a hole in it big enough for SW to get what it needs. Then install a small footprint anti virus like AntiVir. Finally use an XP tweaking guide to remove all unnecessary services from your machine.

I have suggested such things, and there are many ways to do it, even on one machine.

You can always do multiple partitions on a single hard drive and have 2 booting partitions for your "CAD box". One is the partition you use when you MUST go on the internet, and the other is the partition you use when you do SolidWorks.

Of course, you can also plug in an extra internal or external Hard Drive, and do the same thing. Not to mention that you can run either an internal or external RAID setup for safety &/or Archiving, and the newer modular units allow hot swapping. Someone in a meeting said, "But that would cost me $3000.", and my answer was that you could spend a lot more than that if you had the equivalent of a nuked hard drive and had lost time, wages, and all the disk recovery service to pay for.

Go to & check the RT5 for 5 ea 500 gb HDs for $3300.

Virtualization software will let you run two OSs simultaneously, see for $50.

The overall top reason for me to run minimum applications and no Internet on the Solidworks working partition, is that I see easily

99.9% uptime. With no garbage being tossed around, Windows XP SP2 stays humming without BSOD, and SolidWorks rarely ever freezes or quits. It makes for a much more enjoyable work regime.

Given the known problems with Win XP's Registry, malware of all types, crap in the OS that just slows things down, including the various "anti-whatzits", I think it is entirely logical to run your SolidWorks like a race car with minimum overhead.

Bo

Brad wrote:

Thank you for your replies.

Tweaking XP is something that I will have to research, I can see where I would benefit from it. The mention of that also reminded me of something that I rarely do but should and that is cleaning up the SWX temp folder. I wish that SWX had a utility that would feel like XP's disk cleanup (maybe they do and I just don't know it). Regarding multiple boot partitions, that is a good idea and would definitely work, just not for me. We are a small company so I am on a lot of different software during the course of a day. Way too many reboots. Running multiple OS's at the same time with software would be a solution to that but since I have a laptop anyway, I may as well use two machines. In the end I have nowhere near 99.9% up-time, but I also know my computer is a bit of a mess right now. Hopefully following some of these tips will put me at that level.

Thanks

Brad

Bo wrote:

There have been cleanup discussions on this group in the past 1-2 years for both SolidWorks and XP Pro with lots of details.

XP Tweak Guides by Koroush Ghazi had 166 pages in the 2005 edition I have from , and that can help a lot. Someone might have

Black Viper used to have useful tips, tricks and methods, but that site went down in late 2005. Someone might have copies of his work, or the internet archives, as it was valuable, though I suspect repeated elsewhere. He had stuff in there for all Windows versions.

SysInternals is a valuable spot for learning how to turn off or remove services and things not needed in XP:

Could be time well spent.

Bo

Brad wrote:

Not to mention the need for cuffing your wrist to Billy Gates' so you can get constant updates: Unfortunately, MS patches do NOT SEEM TO BE VERY GOOD lately!

As in the most recent critical updates due to another HUGE hole that affects nearly all Windows systems

QUOTE: Dave Aitel, a researcher at Immunity, said his exploits are capable of launching attacks against firewall-protected Windows XP SP2. "A worm is coming. This bug is just too easy to exploit," Aitel said in an interview with eWEEK.

Aitel's company was able to reverse-engineer Microsoft's patch and create a working exploit in less than 24 hours.

Gartner Research security analyst John Pescatore said businesses should prepare for the worst.

"The nature of the vulnerability itself is something that should be taken very seriously. The fact that exploits were out even before Patch Day and now that public code is available for anyone to download and use, that's enough to treat this as a high-priority issue," Pescatore said.

And some people on the SolidWorks group wonder yet today why I only run Mac OSX on the Internet. It takes all types, but when I can run SolidWorks on either native XP Pro or in Virtualization mode on my Intel Mac, why would I want to run SolidWorks on XP Pro on a system that is exposed to the Internet?

Bo

Bo wrote: