This is very frustrating. I have a Dell Optiplex 760 that, on paper at least, looks to have pretty decent specs:

Core2Duo E8600 3.33GHz

3.25Gb RAM

Windows XP SP3

Nvidia Quadro FX1800

SolidWorks 2010 SP0

Although it should be good, it is the most frustrating system I have worked on in the last 10 years. I frequently have mini freezes where the main window becomes completely unresponsive even to mouse input although iTunes will still play in the background. Sometimes when opening files from the network, iTunes will stutter like a skipping record (remember them?). I've had more crashes with this system than I ever recall having with any other configuration I've worked on. The other day the whole thing crashed with an error message that the video driver had stopped working.

I'm not using large assemblies. The most complex things I do are large patterns (384 or 1536 instances) or spiral and spline based swept cuts.

I have run SolidWorks on Apple hardware via Bootcamp and it's been more stable and responsive than this...!

I hope someone can help. Here's what I suspect:

IT policies. The place I work now has a much bigger IT infrastructure than the last few places I've worked. This can have benefits, but it also comes with IT Policy handcuffs. We have Sophos Anti virus and Windows Defender activated by default. We aslo have roaming profiles when we log in. As part of that our 'My Documents' folders are not really on the machine but are aliased to a network location. Could this be part of my problem? Does SolidWorks put temp files in the part directory and would this screw things up if there were network latency issues?

Windows NT. Is everything 100% compatible with NT? I know it's really old, but I haven't heard any plans for us to swtich to Win7 yet. I'm sure using an old OS is better than trying to use one that's too new for the manufacturers but I do start to wonder when NT will be replaced.

Something screwed up at install. Could there be something in the way IT set up my machine that is causing the problems? I have reinstalled the video driver with the one from the SolidWorks website because I didn't trust that it was what they'd used, but it didn't seem to make much difference.

Any ideas that anyone has will be greatfully accepted.

Gavin