New machine is much better
It came with Vista - the version of SW I'm using won't work with Vista. I added a second hard drive and used my laptop's copy of XP on it (which happened to be a regular XP install disk). I'm not using it anymore and it's got a bum screen
Finding drivers for the mobo's chipset have proven to be difficult... And I had to jump through hoops to get the video card working (nothing special - it's onboard
). This is why, in addition to finals, it has taken me some time to get things operational.
But that said - I could open the 3D model and it only took 5-10 seconds! I can move the model without issue and can make edits in a reasonable period of time.... BUT - I can't run CFD on it
Something I didn't anticipate.... Because the model is made of surface loft features (basically, 0 thickness) it's not recognized as a component. If it's not a component, it can't be meshed
So, until I sort that out... I took the side profile of that model, and made a new 2D model. There's some big differences and I've got more detail including windshield wipers).
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Runs that took 3-4 hours before, is now taking 45-60 minutes at an even higher resolution
Old Setup
1 100GB HD
1GB PC2700 Ram
128MB Shared ATI 9000m graphics card
P4 3.2GHz with HTT
New Setup
1 80GB HD to run XP and holds the Vista pagefile
1 620GB HD for Vista AND holds the XP pagefile
6GB of much faster Ram (32bit XP can only address 2.87GB - .5 goes to display)
512MB Shared Geforce 6150 graphics card (old - but working pretty well)
Phenom 9500 Quad Core (2.21GHz)
And now you know what I've been up to
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LeOld
6-7 hours to run
LeNew
3.5 hours to run
