quote: quote: I've built many machines using Asus or Gigabyte motherboards which have RAID built into the chipset ________________________________________________ Thats software based raid. Motherboards don't have true raid built in and it's done through the bios. Wrong, that definately is not software RAID and you do set them up in the BIOS. Software RAID can be setup in Windows and used to be called Dynamic discs by Microsoft. Another hint, if it needs a driver to work, it's not software. If you just search google for software RAID or for a comparison of a RAID card vs. chipset RAID you can quickly and correctly find out the difference. The RAID card will usually have no more than 25% better performance but at 3 or more times the motherboard price.

quote: I hope you back all your data up everyday. Software raid + raid 0 = Guaranteed trouble.I don't know where your getting this from. I agree software RAID stinks, I've never used it. I've built many machines using Asus or Gigabyte motherboards which have RAID built into the chipset & had no problems with RAID. It only needs to be configured in the BIOS, maybe have a hardware driver installed. But you dont use software RAID on these boards. Software RAID is meant to be used on a lower end board with 2 HD's. It is loaded after the OS and so Windows is running non-RAIDED & everything else is. If it's important I back it up on a NAS server unit. If a RAID 0 drive fails you lose your data however if a single drive fails you lose your data too. HD's don't fail very often & I'll take a chance on a 2 drive array but not a 4 or 6.

I use the motherboard RAID 0 array and have no problem. Seperate RAID cards are very expensive and software RAID is not very good. Solid state drives are good as long as you have Windows7. There is no TRIM compatibility on Vista and XP. Without it the drive will slow a bunch in the first few weeks. What's crazy fast is SSD in RAID 0 array. SSD's are so reliable RAID 1 or 5 or 10 is unthinkable.

I've had the same problem. To remove a big chunk I will put points along a path and put each point say .375 apart. Then drill those odd number points first, then even number holes with a .390 drill so the even number holes breaks out on both sides and the chunk can come out whole. But I always have to reorder geometry to do it. I've been wondering how this could be changed so I wouldn't have to do that.

Here at Wichita State University, we are the largest Catia training center in the U.S. Three of our instructors have won the last 5 annual Catia design competitions. I took the prismatic machining course back in R11 and I thought it was incredibaly cumbersom and nearly usless to a research shop like us. Now we are teaching R20 and I will be retaking the course to catch up with the changes. In this shop we use MC X4 and design using it too mostly because the shop manager is close to retirement and doesn't want to take classes but still wants to be able to "supervise" the machinists. I look foreward to when I can design with Catia at work but for now I just play with it. Have my house in Catia and its so cool! If the machining module is improved as much as I"ve been told I might be out of MC.

Have you tried XP compatibility mode? It is a virtual installation of XP. Get Win 7 running then you launch XP mode. I have a scanner that works but didnt get drivers written for it. I also have dual monitors so on one screen is Win 7 x64, on the other is XP x32. The mouse goes from one screen to the other like usual too. Feels kinda creepy, two different operating systems at the same time but the scanner works great. It's a free add on from Microsoft for Win 7.

We have a Bridgeport Series II and did have Series I that's still here but at a different dept. However they both have Boss 9 operating system and communicate the same. So how do I recognize if it has that control? I'll go look and if it's the same I'll tell you how we communicate with ours.

I've seen this several times. Usually a circular or oval cone or dish surface. Two opposite quadrants have a nice smooth finish and the backplot and code show arcs here. Two remaining quadrants have facets, back plot and code show short straight line cuts. Sorry but I never got this problem solved but I think I saw a solution for it but it wasnt needed at the time I saw it so I moved on. I will watch this thread, it's one problem that will bite me again some day, I'm sure of that.

We just got a new Haas VR-8. The head rotates so I believe this is a head/head type machine. We have a Haas trunion post that has been working pretty well. Can this be made to work or should I start with some other post that was included on our CD's? I have emailed our MC dealer for a post but got no reply.

Trim is built into windows 7. Vista, XP do not have it. Simple. I never found any benchmark gain from going from a 7500 rpm drive to a 10,000 rpm drive and I'd be the SSD wont make it quicker either but launching and saving any program or file will make the machine much more responsive and feel like the benchmark is faster. You'll want the CPU with the largest L2 cache you can get, then overclock as far as your confortable with. Check out link below. http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2354230,00.asp

You've tried more than 1 file I assume? I have had problems where I couldn't select anything too. It usually seems to be a Catia conversion file. Quite often restarting MC or the PC has cured the problem.

I have that same video card and OS and they work well together.

My Asus Rampage Formula machine is a quad core Xeon overclocked to 3.5ghz with 8Gb RAM and is still 10 seconds faster on the benchmark than the new Dell T5500 we have here at work. The T5500 has twin quad core CPU's at 2.26ghz and 12Gb RAM.

We had our Haas repairman in here Tuesday about this same issue. 1. He put clump of red grease on top of the pull stud then clamped and released the tool several times. Then put another clump of grease in same place and clamped and released several times again. He said there are rollers that need it on the ends of the draw bar. 2. He put a collet holder without cutter into the spindle then moved the bottom (collett nut) down over the flat of a vice about 1/8 above the vice then clamped and released tool without touching it by hand. This indicated that the draw bar was adjusted properly. 3. He checked to see that the pull stud was not torqued in really hard, but just tightened snuggly. The tool holder should make contact near the top and bottom of the taper. If it contacts in the middle, the stud is too tight and the tool holder will rock on the high spot. 4. He said the taper, both spindle and tool holder need to have fine scratches on them, like you get with fine ScotchBrite. 5. He said dont use any lube at all, run dry. He also said 2 of our 3 machines had a draw bar mechanism made for coolant through the stud and tool holder and said they have a stronger pull. That's his story and he's sticking to it.

We use the Mastercam editor on XP 64bit, Vista 64bit, and Win 7 64bit without problem. However all use the HASP, not the nethasp so I'm sure 64bit alone isn't causing it. Maybe nethasp, maybe nethasp on a 64bit system. Can you open a post processor with it? Are you going to File/Edit/open external.../whatever.pst? If you cant open a postprocessor either, you should probably reinstall MC.

I have wierd things happen to me also but luckily nothing so traumatic. I was creating a curve 5 axis toolpath that are similar to flutes of an end mill. I selected the curve then the lines to control tool vector. Then did the same thing for 2 more flutes. I didn't notice until I ran the part that the first curve ran twice. In Mastercam it showed 2 selections of the curve but did not backplot that way. I deleted one and was fine for the rest of the day. Next morning the same curve was selected 3 times. Couple of days later on a different but similar part all went fine one day, next morning couldnt regen the path. All the vector control lines had to be reselected to regen a path that worked just fine the day before. Nothing has been scrapped or hurt yet but I too am begining to have doubts about trusting the software.

I think hardware is the problem. You say these are 2 identical PC's. Are they really? Lets find out by taking software out of the equation. Make an image of the hard drive on the one that works right. Install the image on the one that doesn't. Now they will be truley identical and should both work the same. We had a similar problem with identical PC hardware but my machine got corrupted and we formatted the drive and reloaded everything but the monitors never were right and MC9 was unuseable. After wasteing a lot of time chaseing our tail we made a drive image of the one that worked and loaded it on mine and it all worked fine. I did figure out the problem. The working PC's got MC9 from the CD and updates from online downlods. We were using the web download which included the all updates on the rebuilt hard drive machine. When we loaded from the CD and updates from the web download all worked fine. The complete web download was the problem. Any way if you make a drive image and install that on the bad machine at least the software will be identical and you'll know hardware is the problem if the problem persists.

I've had this same problem for years. If I ever came off -1 or 0, even starting new paths in a new machine would not allow me to get back to posting G54. I have resorted to setting G54 & G55 to same settings to get comfortable with MC again.

Most anti-virus software can be disabled for a set length of time or until a restart occurs which easily is better than completely removing it. I do this quite often with Symantic and Kaspersky AV apps.

quote: Whats with the old mouse pad..? LOLActually thats a concern with dual widescreen monitors. At home I have a 17" wide mousepad. I can move the cursor all the way across both 24" monitors with less than one stroke across the mousepad but the speed setting is not so high that I have trouble selecting small items. I need one at work too even more so. I have dual 24" monitors plus a second mouse for use with my laptop mouse. I cant stand laptop finger mouse.

We just got 2 new Dell T5500's with 2 Quad core Xeon E5520 CPU's, 12Gb RAM, Quadro FX3800 video card, 10K RPM SATA hard drive for $3,168. We looked at the T7500 but didn't see a reason to spend more on it when this machine has the same CPU and RAM capabilities. The site that has Solidworks & Mastercam optmized PC's had the T5500 for about $800 less than we paid.

Here we have a contract that lets us buy only Dell or HP but at home I only build my own. My last home built held the benchmark record (still might for a single quad core CPU machine) for about 6-9 months. I have $1400 in it and am my own tech support so I am NOT on the phone for hours while a Dell tech guy walks me through fixing my machine. The parts warranty on many components is as long or longer than Dell's. I use parts only from high end brands and haven't RMA'd hardly any components. Recently I advised the IT guys what we wanted as our new PC's and guess what, we ordered 2 Dell T5500's, twin E5520 CPU's, 12Gb RAM, FX3800 video card, & 80Gb Raptor HD loaded with XP 64bit. Almost exactly the same as Solidmark's top offering. This is a very nice machine I highly recommend it. We paid $3,168 ea. on our State contract so the Solidmark price is a very good deal. My homebuilt has twin Dell 2408WFP monitors and I use wireless Logitech keyboard and MX Revolution mouse so parts wise Solidmark thinks very much as I do. However my homebuilt has a 30% overclock at 3.5Ghz and is very stable. It also is about 25 seconds faster on the benchmark than the T5500.

I couldn't run CNC's all day or sit at a monitor all day. This is a research institute that passed MIT and the Air Force acadamy to become #3 in $ in the US on avation research. We also train Catia. We get projects and see them all the way through from sawing the bar stock to 5ax programing and we even get to tell the rocket scientists what they really want sometimes. They will scetch it and we put that into Catia or MC. Often we get to see the tests and we support a wind tunnel, crash lab, lightning lab, signal deprivation lab, and many others. I get to see the future every day. I took the Catia machining class and it was so cumbersome and slow. I often will send 100 small programs a day to a machine because the jobs are all singles or very short runs. Mastercam is essentially the handles of a manual mill. It's very nimble and makes it quick to make a change in program and be back running in a hurry. Thanks MC

I had the same problem with a MS mouse in X3 & 4 on Win7 x64 and never figured it out. I bought a Logitech Reolution MX and it cured that but created another one in Catia that was much easier to fix. Love the MX mouse.

Except for the Raptor your machine specs same as my back up machine. I will try your settings on mine