- [Narrator] When working in SolidWorks
or any other software package that has a high demand
on your computer, it's important to know
what processes and applications are running
in the background, both in that software,
and in the Windows Operating System.
It's commonplace now for many processes and applications
to be running in the background
without the user being aware.
In our day-to-day design work, that's not so critical
when you have a high-demand assembly or part file
in SolidWorks, you want to make sure that you're allocating
the resources of your workstation correctly.
If you're working in SolidWorks and your computer
runs out of resources, you will see an error pop up
and notice a decrease in your performance.
We are trying to increase our performance and productivity,
so let's take a look at what we can do to adjust this
in Windows and then in SolidWorks.
I'm going to start by going to the Windows task manager.
Here we can see all the processes that are running
on my computer currently.
Because I only have SolidWorks running in the foreground,
it's taking up the majority of the memory and CPU capacity.
If you notice any processes in here
that shouldn't be running, you just simply right click
on them and hit end task to stop them.
I will say though, you have to be careful
when doing this.
If you end a task that you're not familiar with
you might have consequences that you don't want.
So please do this carefully and easily.
Next we can look and see what processes
are starting on startup.
Here we have a very small number of applications
that start up when this workstation starts up.
So I'm going to leave that as is.
You might find many other applications are starting up
when you start up your computer,
so here you can just simply disable or enable them
by right clicking on each one.
Again, make sure that you know what the process is
before disabling it.
In my case I simply have SolidWorks
and some recording software running.
Moving over to SolidWorks, let's take a look
at what happens on its startup.
So I'm going to close my current SolidWorks instance,
and reopen it, just as I would normally.
When the splash comes up you see this text coming out here
and it does have meaning.
We can see here that many add-ins are being loaded
as well as other parts of the software.
Now, new to SolidWorks 2018, you'll get warnings
based on your loading performance.
Here we see that we have add-ins that are affecting
how fast SolidWorks starts up.
So let's see how we can manage them.
Clicking on the drop-down menu,
I select add-ins, and here we can see all
of the SolidWorks' add-ins as well as other add-ins
that are available on line.
Starting at the top, we see all
the SolidWorks' premium add-ins.
If you're running SolidWorks Professional
or SolidWorks Standard, this list might be smaller.
But it has the same affect.
So you can see here I have all of these add-ins active.
I don't need the majority of them,
so I'm going to turn them off,
and I'm also going to stop them from starting up
next time I start up.
We still have the ability to turn on any
of these add-ins at any given time
by coming into this menu
and just clicking on active add-ins
and turning them back on.
So I'm going to go through and turn a bunch of these off.
I'm going to leave only the add-ins that I require.
Turning off Trace, Composer, the forms and PCB.
And down here I also have add-ins that I've downloaded,
which is becoming more and more common.
You want to make sure that you have these turned off
as well because usually they require a connection
to the internet, or some kind of computational resource
that you don't want to allocate to them
unless you're using them.
In my case, for doing instant quoting.
I just want to turn those off as well.
I hit okay,
I'm going to close SolidWorks,
and now start it up again and see how long it takes.
Verifying our license, going through,
and now you can see it's only added the components
that I needed in the add-ins options,
and loaded much faster.
So you can see by adjusting your startup options
for SolidWorks and Windows,
you'll be able to increase your performance.