When you Restart your computer it’s considered a “warm boot”.  Performing a Shut Down is referred to as a “cold boot”.  During a “warm boot” power to the memory chips is not completely lost as it would be on a “cold boot”.  Therefore, if you want to ensure that memory on your system is completely flushed, Shut down your computer and wait approximately 30 seconds before rebooting.  On a system utilizing SolidWorks, it’s recommended that you perform a cold boot daily.

Do you ever get the feeling that your computer is doing things behind your back?  Does it take a long time to boot up in the morning?  If so, then you probably have programs running in the background that open on startup that you aren’t aware of.  To see a list of these, run the msconfig program built into your Windows operating system.

In Windows XP, click on Start, then Run, and then type in msconfig. 

In Vista or Windows 7, click on Start, and then type msconfig in the Search box.

Click on the Startup tab and uncheck the ones you don’t want to run at start up.  The next time you reboot, those programs will not start.

One of the default settings in Windows Explorer that can not only cause a problem in SolidWorks but can also be a potential security issue is Hidden File Extensions.

Since this is a blog for SolidWorks, I’ll mention the SolidWorks issue first. I had a support call from a customer who was having a problem saving her Sheet Format. She had everything laid out like she needed and went to File>Save Sheet Format but when she tried to use the format it wasn’t available. When she saved the sheet format, the file extension was not added because she had the file extensions hidden. As soon as we turned them back on and she resaved the sheet format, it worked okay.

Contrary to our previous announcement, SolidWorks 2011 WILL continue to support the Windows XP Professional operating system.