V8.1.1 Slow File Get

[Steve Landkamer]

Good Morning Forum,

I have a customer that is running NT4 with SP5 on a PII 266 with 576MB RAM. He is using Ver. 8.1.1 and has the standard windows dialog for file "Get". It is taking about 45 seconds for the dialog to open. Does anyone know of a way to speed things up?

 

I want to say I remember there was a fix for this but since I hit 40 the senior moments have been coming a little to often.

 

Thanks,

Steve

[Harryman]

Good morning Steve.

 

I have run MC on a P3 933 running NT4, and a P3 800 running Win 2000 pro.

 

I've never put the stopwatch to work, but the 800 with Win 2000 seems faster. Both are plenty busy.

 

A 266 running NT4 sounds pretty under powered for MC. The 933 with NT4 is pretty underpowered.

 

My reseller said Athalon chips tend to run MC faster than comperable Intel. Might be time to upgrade that 266.

[Steve Landkamer]

Harryman,

Thanks for the input. I have been waiting to tell the customer as a last resort to upgrade the system.

Steve

[Bullines]

45 seconds is unncessarily long. Is it possible that the customer has A LOT of files in the MC8 directory? Perhaps the wait is caused by the time needed by Mastercam to load many filenames in the listbox of the "File | Get" dialog.

[Toolfab]

Steve, is the path for the "file/get" mapped to a network drive? If so and there is heavy traffic on the server, that will cause a delay.

 

If so, so if it takes that long "getting" a file off of his local drive.

 

HTH

[Steve Landkamer]

Bullines & Paul,

Thanks for the information.

I did not even think about how many files it could be looking at. I think they use a customer directory with sub-dir and it may be pre-reading that also. They are checking on the mapped drive now.

Thanks,

Steve

[2 flute]

I have noticed if the file is really big and there is long tool paths it takes a while to pull up while the nci file is loading.

[Charles Davis]

I had another person with this problem which surfaced after doing and upgrade from Win2000 to WinXP Pro.

 

The recommendation is to always do a clean install after a low level format.

 

You may also try turning off the Windows Fast Indexing service (go to the hard drive, right click, properties, unclick "Allow indexing service to index this disk for fast file searching".

[Jimmy Wakeford from Barefoot CNC]

Steve,

Turn off "enable open gl" and turn down hardware accel on vid card.(I dont know what it has to do with it.)

Jimmy

[Fig sign]

Charles !

 

IMHO low level format can not be achieved through

format cOmmand and it is a dangerous operation which can ruin your hard drive and in most cases unneeded one.

How are you doing it ?

I do it through BIOS or some special programs as a last effort to repair the bad hard disk:

Like to change interleave so that the first tracks will become the last one ,if you have the defects on the start of the disk and disk is unbootable .

It takes a lot of time to do it BTW !

 

Iskander teh hard disk repairman !

 

[ 07-29-2003, 07:17 AM: Message edited by: plasttav ]

[Ken Erman from CNC Software Inc.]

Steve,

 

On my 2000 system the first File, Get of the session is always slower than the rest by a large amount. I think it is resolving all of the MRU files in the list and checking all of the network drives as well. If you have bitmaps on with the file name it could extend the time as well. A PII 266 is about 7 years old, that is between 7 and 14 generations of hardware behind. For less than 2K you can speed him up and be his hero.

[Fig sign]

If you client has an antivirus network client

like Symantec antyvirus corporate edition it also can slow this process !

[Steve Landkamer]

Thanks Guys!

I will have to try out your suggestions.

Some of these I had forgotten about.

Thanks Again.

Steve

[Charles Davis]

plastav,

 

sorry, I think I used the term "low level format" inappropriately. It's been a while since I changed the OS on a computer, but as I recall I used to reformat the hard disk using the software that came from the hard disk manufacturer.

 

thanks for catching me on this.

[Bullines]

quote:

---

ut as I recall I used to reformat the hard disk using the software that came from the hard disk manufacturer.

---

That is indeed a low-level format, then

[Fig sign]

+1 to Bullines!

 

The format command don`t format anything .it only writes the new file table .

Because of this in Linux this procedure has more

reasonable name makefs (makefilesystem).

[Müřlıń®]

With an electron microscope they can read everything that ever got copied to your hard-drive.....no matter how many times you format it

 

**twilite zone music**

 

 

Murlin

[Fig sign]

quote:

---

With an electron microscope they can read everything that ever got copied to your hard-drive.....no matter how many times you format it

---

No need ...

The old dos Unformat or Norton utilities or a bunch of various modern programs for unformatting !

The important thing is try not to write on disk before unformating , in other words to do unformat right after format done by mistake !

[zion22]

I dunno if you solved this problem, but I had the same quite a while with XP home and V8, 9, 9.1

 

I solved it tho, by using the CNCReg.exe and changed to Windows Standard dialogs.

 

Something is wrong with the Mastercam dialogs under certain circumstances, but I havn't figured what it is yet...