I've been working this afternoon to allow F&F plenty of leeway for my surprise party...

  Around 1:30pm I had to reboot, because SolidWorks 2012 SP4 lost its mind again...  I got back to work at 1:34pm, hit save just before diving in, out of force of habit, and started editing a new set of sketches for my model.  Everything was going fine until a little after 5:pm, s'ware crashed hard with the "have you seen this before dialog.  I said no, and entered a short report.

  About 5:15 I re-opened bmy assembly, and quickly discovered that the past 4 hours work had *VANISHED* -- gone, evaporated!  Now here is why I am *FURIOUS* -- I've been hitting ctrl+S each time I close a sketch.  Autorecover is turned on, and set for 15 minutes -- and believe me I have to wait for it on the 1/4 hour like clockwork.  I realize it *seems* like the OS failed to write any files, but I submit that the files were simply never asked to be committed by the s'ware, because I never left the sketching mode and never created a part!

  I thought I was doing really well.  I had onened the assembly and set all resolved to lightweight and hid them all.  That seemed to perk up the UI significantly.  No longer was I having to wweight 30 seconds between mouse clicks like I was before the morning crash.

  I will not accept thenanswer that the fault was the OS -- when I hit save and watch the disk light flash and have to wait for i/o that marches lock-step whth what I am doing on screen, I have to believe that the application is in control of what the computer is doing.

  I've got *HUNDREDS* of files in C:\Users\Paul\AppData\Local\SolidWorks with no extension, which I tend to believe were my work-product for almost 4 hours, but they are all zero byte and have filenames that look like GUIDs.  More interestingly, they are taking up over 16,500MB of disk space -- very unusual for zero-byte files, unless data is being exported to alternate data streams within the file.  I have to assume the crash finally came about because my disk reported full -- I have >32Gb of free space, but who knows what it was doing with compression etc... it's still almost 1/2 of the free space, and it's still 16G -- wtf?

  Will someone *PLEASE* tell me when, how, and ???IF??? I'll ever be able to trust the software, to stop wasting my time and effort?

BTW, I've captured, and streamed, and edited hundreds of hours of video with this computer, with 'nary a frame lost, or corrupted.  I use software ranging from "specific & free" i.e. VideoDub, to "expansive & expensive", e.g. Adobe Master Collection, to name just a few.  The machine passes *every* diagnostic I throw at it, it is quiet, and relaible, unless it is running SolidWorks!  I'm also not going to accept a cop-out "diagnostic" like: "You have too much clutter on my machine. Try a clean install."

  I have one and only one comment for the SolidWorks development team -- *** Get your house in order!  Excuses are not acceptable. ***