New computer justification

Check out Anna Wood's thread at the SW disussion forum in the "performance" section. She's creating a spreadsheet of benchmarks for different systems. From what she's shown so far the E6600 Core 2 Duo's are pretty fast. You can also find the information on her blog

a notepad beside the keyboard can be used to quickly jot down the wait times for typical tasks. at the end of the day, this will add up.

maybe bob z. is a little dense... o.k., bob z. is A LOT dense. why don't you (well, not *you* exactly) buy one or two computers every month or so? this doesn't seem to or at least shouldn't hurt the bottom line as bad as buying all at once. if a bad month comes along and you can't buy the computers, you'll just have to wait until the next month! a previous employer of bob z. had approximately 20 seats of swx and there was a process in place similar to this. they weren't buying computers every month - it was closer to every 6 months, but it was like a light at the end of the tunnel. everyone had hope. what is life without hope?

bob z. p.s. alfalfa, will you swing me before we have lunch? sure, darla.

There is a performance monitor that ships with every seat of Windows. In it you can gather statistics including CPU time used by particular executables. Once you collect a days worth of data on one or more systems you look at the amount of time the CPU spends versus the amount of time the person was actually sitting at the machine doing something. If CPU time is above 10% of the time someone is using a machine it is probably justifiable to change. Or you could just walk around at lunch and at close of business and see how much time is racked up in task manager (providing SW hasn't crashed).

TOP

PS CPU time is time spent waiting.

You have to justify it with numbers and dollars.

Use a spreadsheet, jot down hourly rates, time waiting, etc, wasted time, crash/restarts, etc. Try to find some speeds of your machine, video card, etc so you can compare it to the speeds of a new machine(benchmarks). New computers are 'greener' too! Don't forget to throw in a 22" widescreen LCD...go all out.

Now estimate a time to complete a task on the old and new, from boot up to rebuilding an assembly. Convert the time wasted into dollars, then multiply that by the number of seats. If you have to, rent a computer for a couple days to compare apples to apples.

Your bosses will fall on the floor, when they realize how much the old machines are costing them. Convert the dollars into 'Return on Investment' time, and they will realize the longer they wait, the more they are wasting. Compare it to driving a 20 year old vehicle. Also tell them that computers have a life span of about 3-5 years, because the technology has increased speeds by 4 times.

Bosses like to see the words 'Cost of ownership', and 'Return on Investment'. Don't worry about your IS department, they are the ones who will do the installation. Why does your IS depatment have all new computers? I'll bet they do.

Put this into a nice report, take your bosses out to lunch, and have them look it over.

samurai.

I will have my spreadsheets updated this weekend with the results people have sent me this past week.

There is no doubt that the new Intel and AMD hardware is much faster then the old Intel P4 CPU's. I lean to Intel's C2D at the moment for the performance advantage. We look at about three years for engineering workstations before they are moved to other parts of the company. Sometimes a bit sooner if circumstances warrant it.

If you would like and do not have NDA issues, send me a couple of your problem files. I can run them on my systems I have and post times for re-build. I am hoping to get a library of parts to have available for people to do some benchmarking with. My e-mail is on my blog.

One of our systems down in our CNC department went south today, so we will be getting a new Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 computer up in engineering to replace the system we will hand down to the CNC guys. I have a Dell Precision 390 spec'ed out and I hope that management will let me get some competitive bids from Xi, Boxx and HP. The Dell's are a bit pricey in my mind and I am hoping some bidding with a few vendors will get us some better prices. I will be able to add to the results in my benchmark in a few weeks when our new systems arrive.

Regards,

Anna Wood

blog

Seth,

From places I've worked, especially larger companies - the world is controlled by accountants! Therefore reduce it to what only they can understand = numbers. This would be how much they are bleeding in time. Hours numbers = dollars numbers. I would imagine upgrades to computers will happen fairly soon after ?

I have published a Google Spreadsheet of the results for re-builds on my punch holder part.

Anna Wood

Thanks for doing this Anna!

No doubt it will help a lot of people justify a new PC, it's convinced me buying an M90 is not, too, much a waste of my money. Although I will go for the fastest processor available.

John Layne

Anna,

Been a while since I posted on this subject. Still no new computers in site.

I showed your list to my boss and showed him where we fell in the list (3rd from last at 348 sec). The fasted speed listed is approx. 3.5 times faster. That is a VERY significant difference.

Since this time is based on rebuild times, my boss asked me how much time that would save us a day. I told him that I was not sure, because it depended on how much time was spent rebuilding in a day. He asked how many times we typically did a rebuild in a days time, so I guessed at a number here. He asked me to start keeping a tic-mark count of how many times I rebuild in a day.

I started doing this today and realized that it wasn't really going to tell me what I needed to know, in order to help justify new computers. What I truely need to know is not how many times I rebuild, but how much time is spent rebuilding.

Does anyone know if there is some way to track how much time is spent doing a rebuild during a day? Surely there has got to be some utility or macro that turns on a timer or something when a rebuild begins, and turns it off when the rebuild is finished. If not there should be. If I could get an average time spent rebuilding in a day, based on the comparisons in Anna's list, I could easily determine how much time could be saved just doing rebuilds. This alone would definately be enough to justify new systems. Not to mention other non-rebuild related time savings.

Thanks for any help.

Seth

"Seth Renigar" a écrit dans le message de news: snipped-for-privacy@57g2000hsv.googlegroups.com... Write the proc. time dedicated to SW on the task manager.

Seth, this sounds to me like another valuable tool that should be in the SolidWorks toolset to allow the users to be able to quantify how they spend their time, so they can evaluate efficiency compared to other users and other machines.

This is the sort of down and dirty tool that is long overdue. And I can see for users who do large assemblies, it could be a life/ frustration saver in getting FACTS in front of decision makers.

Bo

I don't follow what you are saying here. If you are talking about the CPU column on the Processes tab, that is always fluctuating. It doesn't add up the processing time.

Or is there something I am missing?

Seth

Bo,

Yeah I agree. It seems like someone would have already created some sort of tool like this already. That's why I'm asking if anyone knows of one.

I'm sure there are many of us that fight the battle with management about computer upgrades. A tool like this would definately help a lot of people that are frustrated using their turd computers, like me. Though there would still be some in management that would not be swayed by the numbers, it would still help the the majority.

Seth

if you go to the task manager and go to the process tab then go to >view>select columns you can select CPU time as a column then you can see how much processor time each application is using.

You may be able to make a corellation to processor time used and processor speed.

Steve R

I don't follow what you are saying here. If you are talking about the CPU column on the Processes tab, that is always fluctuating. It doesn't add up the processing time.

Or is there something I am missing?

Seth

"Jean Marc" wrote in news:46af4b40$0$4182 $ snipped-for-privacy@news.free.fr:

This will show only the time for the current session, and SW pegs to core when rotating the view no matter the processor. So, this will not givea measure of time spent on rebuilds.

What is needed is an add-in that watches for rebuild events and times them, writing a log that spans sessions. Beyond my abilities, unfortunately. Something similar could also monitor load and save times, if I'm not mistaken.

Dale,

I didn't know you could do this in the task manager. This is close to what is needed.

But I agree with you. The important thing is that it needs to track rebuild events only. Not everything that SW does. Even most of the slower processors can handle the medial SW tasks without any significant slowdown. There is no benefit to track CPU time for those chores. I even saw the task manager tracking CPU time just by mousing over faces.

However, this same add-in/utility/macro could also have added features to help with justifying other hardware areas, such as what you mentioned, load and save times. This might be useful to help justify a new hard drive. But this would simply be a bonus, not necessary

Programming is like WAY over my head as well. Is anyone up to the "task" of creating something like this?

Seth

You could create a performance log/alert and track all the values you're looking for. It will take some setting up, but you get exact data. But no, you can not track specific actions within the program, just what the system resources are doing.

My best justification for a new computer is to set up an assembly that requires a rebuild, bring in your boss to show him something or ask his input, then tell him to hold on I this has to rebuild. Why he's there staring at the Windows hourglass with you, he usually tells you to look into getting a new computer. It takes only 1 time for them to realize how much time you waste a day to justify new computers.

--Scott

There is a utility in windows called performance monitor. Go to >start>run and type in perfmon this will bring up a utlity that will track processor usage.

Go here:

for a tutorial on using the app.

Have not used it myself but this came up by doing a google search using "performance counters" as a search string.

Steve R

Swizzle,

I have done this many times. My boss is well aware of the need. But he is kindof in the same boat. He has to give hard data to be able to justify requesting $70,000 to replace all of our engineering computers. He actually gave me the task of gathering this data. Hence my need for an app to track rebuild times.

I'm open to any other sources or ideas to help gather the data needed though....

Seth