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Upgrading a 2005 Dell 380 a Waste or Not?

morsetaper2

New member
I have a home computer I run ProE on. I occasionally bring work home and use this computer by borrowing a license from my work license server.

Its a Dell Precision 380 purchased in June of 2005. It works fine for internet browsing, MS office products, etc. But not good w/ ProE WF4. It was a ProE certified machine for WF2 when it was orig purchased. And it worked fine on WF2 & WF3. But on WF4 it has problems and ProE crashes.

MACHINE: Dell precision 380, P4 processor 521, 2.80 GHz, 1 MB L2 cache, 800MHz

RAM: 2 GB

VIDEO CARD: ATI FireGL V3100, 128 MB, dual VGA or single DVI/VGA

Now the problem w/ ProE is moving or rotating assy models it gets coggy and the image lags my mouse moves, highly annoying and frustrating. Single parts, or a single drawing, a couple open windows, its OK and useable.

Mid and larger assys are trouble. And if the model has datum curves, or I change the background to white, ProE will crash often enough that its totally unusable. I have tried downloading different video drivers from the Nvidia website but no help.

Was orig a 1GB RAM machine, I filled the remaing slots with an additional GB to bring it up to 2 GB RAM. No help.

So I was thinking a 125MB video card is just not adequete. I would consider throwing $100+ or so at a better video card if it might help.

It is a 2005 system, so maybe it is time to replace. But it only has problems in ProE, and its my home computer, so I'm not anxious to throw a bunch of $$ at a new home computer that for the most part works fine.

Is upgrading the video card an option to get ProE useable? It is a "PCI Express" card. Or is the bus/motherboard/system just too old?

Appreciate any advice, and Thanks!

Mark


Edited by: morsetaper2
 
It makes a hugedifference upgrading to 4GByte of RAM
Wildfire 4 uses far more RAM than Wildfire 2


I upgraded all CAD-stations to 4 GByte whenrolled-out Wildfire 4 and wesucessfully run Wildfire 4 on Dell 370, 380 and 390.
 
They differ but all have nVidia Quadro graphic with 512MBytes or more


The biggest issue is 32-bit operating systems. The users running 64-bit XP and have 8-16GBytes of RAM are far more happy when working with assemblies.


Using the /3GB switch in boot.ini allows ProE to behave better but Windows to behave worse. At least the user can select, at boot-time, in what mood to boot.
 

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