Unwitting beta tester for a software company

[Russ Smith]

Nothing worse than upgrading software and finding out your company is being used as a beta tester without knowing it. We upgraded from Solidworks 2013 to 2014 and it's been an abject failure. We upgraded the graphics drivers as recommended by Solid Works, did the upgrade, and then watched as one user after another had crashes and stability problems.

SW insists it's not their drivers it's our systems, worked with 2013, not with 2014 but it's not their fault. We've already replaced 2 systems, Dell won't change out the graphics cards(Nvidia boards seem to work, AMD's don't work well with new drivers and 14).

now we're seeing lots of secondary issues like monitors not working after a system goes into sleep mode. We get the Desktop Windows Manager has stopped working which will suddenly turn a monitor off, or the system will come out of sleep and now one monitor is black and you get that message. Sometimes you can restart the service, sometimes it's already started. It appears to be related to the Solidworks drivers although again they insist it's not their problem it's Dell or Windows.

What a pain in the neck.

I had one user who I suggested he update his BIOS, he did, but I forgot to warn him to suspend Bitlocker first and now every reboot it asks for the recovery key because of course the BIOS is different than it was when he encrypted it. My fault was focused on the Windows manager problem and forgot to warn him about Bitlocker.

 

[cardncubfan]

We use Solidworks 2014 & don't have any issues. We don't use Dell computers either though & I believe all of our video cards are Nvidia. I believe our whole shop has $400 Acer computers from Newegg.

 

[Russ Smith]

We use Solidworks 2014 & don't have any issues. We don't use Dell computers either though & I believe all of our video cards are Nvidia. I believe our whole shop has $400 Acer computers from Newegg.

Even some of the Nvidia ones have the problem but they are clearly working better than the AMD ones. I don't know that it's the card, I just think SW Nvidia drivers are better than the AMD drivers.

We have some VERY large files, most of the regular users are ok it's the ones working on the really big drawings that are having the problems. Solidworks was actually here a few weeks ago to do a training and what's new in 2014 class and the guy was beaten over the head repeatedly by angry users whose machines won't stop crashing. He apparently stood his ground, took the company line and insisted it's our machines not their drivers and software.

I will say this, we should not be using laptops, you can get much more powerful machines for less money if you buy a desktop and I'm not 100% convinced that some of our problems aren't caused by laptops heating up and crashing the graphics card. they of course have their own heatsink and fan but laptops run hot and I am suspicious if some of our issues aren't entirely because of that. Most companies that use Solidworks are probably not using laptops as extensively. I have googled it and we're not alone.

I'm installing 2014 for this one user on a M6400 right now. Will let him test how stable it is and if it holds up, will then setup the full machine for him to use as his new machine.

We have a former employee here who left us to work for Solidworks(he had worked there before too) and he's trying to get them to mediate our problems for free because he's well aware of the problems we have and fully agrees it's their drivers not our systems that are the problem. He's trying to get them to essentially give us free tech support but he agrees unfortunately the AMD cards simply don't play nice with 2014 and we have several machines with those cards and replacing the cards is both very complicated(in a laptop) it voids our Dell warranty.

It doesn't help that some of our users with unstable machines seem to not get that it might make some sense to regularly save your file you're working on in case it crashes.

 

[cardncubfan]

Even some of the Nvidia ones have the problem but they are clearly working better than the AMD ones. I don't know that it's the card, I just think SW Nvidia drivers are better than the AMD drivers.

We have some VERY large files, most of the regular users are ok it's the ones working on the really big drawings that are having the problems. Solidworks was actually here a few weeks ago to do a training and what's new in 2014 class and the guy was beaten over the head repeatedly by angry users whose machines won't stop crashing. He apparently stood his ground, took the company line and insisted it's our machines not their drivers and software.

I will say this, we should not be using laptops, you can get much more powerful machines for less money if you buy a desktop and I'm not 100% convinced that some of our problems aren't caused by laptops heating up and crashing the graphics card. they of course have their own heatsink and fan but laptops run hot and I am suspicious if some of our issues aren't entirely because of that. Most companies that use Solidworks are probably not using laptops as extensively. I have googled it and we're not alone.

I'm installing 2014 for this one user on a M6400 right now. Will let him test how stable it is and if it holds up, will then setup the full machine for him to use as his new machine.

We have a former employee here who left us to work for Solidworks(he had worked there before too) and he's trying to get them to mediate our problems for free because he's well aware of the problems we have and fully agrees it's their drivers not our systems that are the problem. He's trying to get them to essentially give us free tech support but he agrees unfortunately the AMD cards simply don't play nice with 2014 and we have several machines with those cards and replacing the cards is both very complicated(in a laptop) it voids our Dell warranty.

It doesn't help that some of our users with unstable machines seem to not get that it might make some sense to regularly save your file you're working on in case it crashes.

I think your issue could very well be the laptops. What size files are you talking about? We have very large files ourselves. We design, build, & repair plastic injection molds & keep all of our files on a main server. Then only pull off the server what we need to use. I know we had to switch to Windows 7 Pro for SW2014.

 

[Russ Smith]

I think your issue could very well be the laptops. What size files are you talking about? We have very large files ourselves. We design, build, & repair plastic injection molds & keep all of our files on a main server. Then only pull off the server what we need to use. I know we had to switch to Windows 7 Pro for SW2014.

I'm not sure of actual sizes to be honest I'm not one of the regular users. I just know that has been the comment the bigger the file the more likely to crash.

We're on Win 7(actually Ultimate) and most of our users now have at least 16GB of RAM.

I am quite suspicious that it's just laptops overheating and crashign the graphics card but it still seems to be related to 2014, that is the same files on the same laptop didn't crash in 2013.

So far the M6400 is stable but I'm waiting until next week to declare it ok and start installing more on it.

Also was told by someone that Solidworks has pledged to have updated drivers for AMD cards soon. I guess in one sense I owe them an apology, SW doesn't write the drivers, Nvidia and AMD do, so if the AMD cards and drivers are buggy it's AMD's fault, not SW.

 

[Covert Rain]

I know what you mean. We started using Tableau for aggregating and building data presentation layers because they were supposed to be the next big XXXX. We have noticed that often we are beta testing some features or reporting bugs that should have been caught before release.

That seems to be the way of the world when it comes to games, blu rays players (see constant updates for titles), hardware firmware or even basic software there days.