After watching "massive assemblies, no sweat" on the solidworks website:

http://www.solidworks.com/sw/resources/videos/choose-solidworks-series.htm

I think there must be something wrong with our assemblies, parts, hardware, or software.

In the video they are able to open an assembly with around 6,500 components in around 1:15 seconds.  When they use "large assembly mode" the same assembly opens in :20.

I have an assembly with 1,850 components that takes over 6:30 minutes to open in "large assembly mode".  This is just one example but most of our assemblies seem to take forever to open compared to the video and what I have been told solidworks is capable of.

We do keep all of our parts on the network, but, to eliminate that variable I have saved every detail part and assembly to my local machine.  I don't see any noticable difference between loading the parts off of the gigabit network or off of my local machine.

I have a Dell Precision T5500 running Windows 7 Professional x64

Solidworks 2011 x64 Sp3

12 GB RAM

Xeon x5677

We were using Solidworks 2006 forever and I finally convinced management to upgrade but the speed is not what I expected/promised.  We hardly notice any decrease in load/save times and a lot of the engineers claim the old version was faster.  I need to figure out what is causing this stuff to run so slowly.