Dezignstuff SolidWorks Blog

The Xi box has performed well, with one exception, and it is difficult to know where to point the finger.

The problem has been that when running SW08 (for one particular project where that is what the customer is using), I get little boxes around the cursor where the parts change colors. Is this the video card driver or crap software? Hard to know.

The 1700 graphics card has in general not left me over-awed.  I would be interested to see if the combination with the SW09 software would perform better, but I find using SW08 to be a bit of an ordeal. My next major project will be on SW09. The main problems are the colors interface, the lack of a removable PropMgr, lack of a configurable CommandMgr.

The Vista OS also causes problems with the thumbnail display. Again, is this Vista’s fault or SW? You can’t get the combination of functionality that 07 and XP offered. I like to turn off the Thumbnail Display setting in SW and alternate between the Detail and Thumbnail views in the Windows Explorer and SW Open or Save dialogs. Vista gives you the tiny useless thumbnails regardless. You can’t identify part or assembly from those tiny thumbnails, nor can you identify the part or assembly.

Anyway, this is all annoying, but it’s not the fault of Xi at all. The machine works flawlessly, it’s the graphics and software and OS that don’t seem to have their act together.

A commenter had a question, so I need to clarify some stuff.

Here is what XP does with Detail and Thumbnail views in Windows Explorer:

The Details view is good (middle). I like to see the SW icons to quickly identify filetypes. The XP thumbnails aren’t that great (bottom), but they do at least work.

Here is what Vista does:

Ok, so the Vista Thumbnails view (bottom) is fantastic in comparison (size options are great), but the Details view (middle) is awful. You can’t get it to show SW part and assembly icons. Worse yet, the option in SW for the thumbnails is turned on and grayed out: