What's the verdict on SP4.0?

I think my prior statment about feeling lucky with SP v4 may need revision, John.

Later - Bo

We are seeing good results with SP4.0. Several issues were addressed and I am not finding much on the down side for how we use it.

WT

I've gotten a some "failed to save" errors and I'm having some mating issues but it did fix one pretty big problem I had on 1 assembly

The sad truth about updates is that companies like SolidWorks need to address each problem as it is fixed with an update.

When you look at what Apple and Microsoft are doing, they wind up often offering weekly or monthly updates & when a crapout on a SPECIFIC update occurs, they will follow it with a corrective update within days.

The issue of tolerating known problems of significance for months and months is simply not tolerable any more. The actual SolidWorks user's man hours lost on 500,000 user's work (admittedly not all are probably active) can be millions of man hours lost per month for a bug.

More numerous fixes are simply a FACT OF LIFE TODAY.

I hope we start getting them. I would like to have Apple take care of SolidWorks updates with their slick system and high bandwidth servers and simply click "Update SolidWorks" and zam, it happens transparently while I work on something else. Why should I go through checking off whether I need 2, 3, 4 ,5 or 6 updates and then individually install, and install in the right order, etc.

That is what INSTALLER APPLICATIONS are supposed to do.

Ask Apple!

Sheesh - Bo

hmmm well it doesnt concern me much now I dont follow subs but I'll chip in... I think this would be a wrong move. I certainly dont want SW doing anything automatically in the background and often. They just screw up the basics too often to allow that and very often break things in the process of fixing others. You would never really know just what broke and when or be able to trust it to work from day to day. Small time users rely on update lemmings to give early warning of problems before installing themselves and avoid grief which impacts their bottom line much more so. We do not need in any circumstance CAD equivalent episodes to the recent Symantec update that reduced thousands of Chinese pc's to junk, or even just cripple your network for a couple of days till a patch is made... The real problem here is a lack of commitment to out of the box quality made at the top level of management. Simply put profits and growth come before customers. Its been like this for quite a while now. It isnt about to change. It is part of the short term business mindset prevalent in the US.

CORE ISSUE BY NEILS: "out of the box quality"

I agree! I do not remember the last time a Software Update from Apple broke something for me, and that is with software far more complex than SolidWorks in total. So I know it is possible to produce quality code.

SolidWorks should be the same, providing the do quality code with great auditing and comments so it is all detailed to a "Tee". But I personally have a sneaking suspicion that the Quality System for the whole code package has some problems, and occassionally they are not just niggling little irritations.

Later - Bo

Maybe all the good code writers have been employed by Apple !!

Solidworks and others have whats left ? :-)

MORE AND MORE MATE ERRORS!!!!!!

Just to keep things even :) - last year an itunes update caused all my itunes tracks to play with horrible static, resulting in much internet searching to find the cause and then the solution, to reinstall an old version.

Its not the code writers that are the problem, its the company's attitude thats the problem.

Ok, with a few notable (and welcome, Wayne) exceptions, is it possible to get a targeted response to the original question? Despite all of the emotional responses, I really don't care about what happens with other software or about what some may guess the programming skills are of the SolidWorks employees.

Let's try to get more helpful in our responses. I am on 3.0 and waiting for the same info as John.

Please help!

No the good ones are employed by Adobe. In my 15 years of using Photoshop I've had it crash TWICE. And if you think Solidworks users have it bad you ought to fight with 3ds max for a while. It's getting better but the early versions were $hit.

1. Given the user variables in how work is done, I think it is tough to generalize for one user...But...

Matt Lombard & others have pointed out 'Best Practices' for a number of large assembly issues to maintain performance, and I recall copying down those pages of info, which I have reread from time to time. It is easy to gloss over and forget those sometimes.

Mates to axes and planes are most stable, and when constructed (usually in the original construction of objects or in an assembly drawings) just for that purpose have made my assemblies rock solid.

Mates to a flat surface that then gets a radius or chamfer to its edge later can break mates, whereas a mate to the plane that locates the key surface will be rock solid even if that surface is modified dozens of times (incliuding being modified by a patterned feature).

1A. Example: TOP noted specifics in the "ASSEMBLY PERFORMANCE" thread,

TOP then noted that examining the assembly with the problems noted specific problems with a pattern and that the guy who did the assembly had in-context relations and patterned assemblies, with mates to the patterned items which slowed things to a crawl, which improved when changed (amongst other notes).

In-context for me, created many difficulties, so if I start with external references, I wind up doing "Break All" to get rid of external references early on, but that is just me.

1B. I found early on I had to suppress some 2 degree indexing splines (even though they were short), as they brought SolidWorks to a snail pace on speed, in assemblies, as did a functional diamond knurl on Ultrasonic bonding horns, to be CNC cut.

That suggests to me that patterns of features and patterns of objects in assemblies both cause slowdowns, and the only fix ultimately there is coding methods. I know absolutely nothing about coding, so I don't know what is possible. It appears users of Solid Edge say it handles large assemblies better, as does CATIA. Hence, I think it is possilbe, but I have no clue about if it is possible in SolidWorks.

It may be that repetitive patterns generated as sketch patterns or feature patterns cause internal looping-checking in SolidWorks that slows things & no one can fix that but programmers.

1. I really DO CARE about what happens with other software as noted about Adobe & Apple in this thread, as they have shown it IS POSSIBLE to write very complex multi-application code that doesn't suck on speed, AND that can be updated with a software update system, that does most of the drudge work, keeping user mistakes to a minimum.

Apple's Software Update is something SolidWorks, would do well to emulate or license. Why should the SolidWorks user have to keep track of all the subtleties, and be required to become an expert at keeping track of all the various elements updated and installed?

An installer should check what is installed, where, whether multiple SWks versions are installed, whether Toolbox is local or on a networks, etc, etc. and then offer options to the user if needed, and do and check everything. Why should a user have to go to edit a Registry or manually move, make backups of or delete specific files?

If a user goofs, and misses getting, or installing one required update or the right update, it can goof things. Then, too, it is sometimes tough to tell if you have already downloaded and installed the same eDrawings or Swks Explorer version, and you waste time downloading and installing the same thing over.

Why should a user have to manually copy the many dozens of Help files in this day and age? Is that not what computers are made to do? If a user or VAR or SWks wants or needs to check what happened on any system, there should be a log file.

Arguably, Apple & Adobe had to have a top notch Software Update System, because it has probably tens of millions of users updating their computers automatically, and the user botches & requests would be unmanageable without that system. Hey, that sounds like a reason to do the same thing at SolidWorks.

Bo