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an ugly name for an old topic.

I have still been having crashing issues.

I have narrowed it down to drawings of building elevations.

The differences between my elevations and say, my floor plans is that I use a lot of hatch in the elevations to denote different cladding materials, otherwise they are much less complex drawings. No walls, fewer symbols and these are mostly simple drawings of windows in elevation.

The size of my latest crashable elevations is down to 815 kb or something. On someone's advice I have played around with my extensions turning some off a few at a time to see if crashing issues are resolved. I couldn't resolve the CI's but I did manage to shut down my network system, cause VW not to start, disable all the stuff needed to run Renderworks etc etc. VW still crashes. There are hundreds of extensions and finding the conflicts if there are conflicts between extensions is a lifetimes work examining all the permutations. I don't have a lifetime unfortunately.

I have tried various combinations of virtual memory and RAM. I have 256 MB of ram in the machine now as well as a partitioned section of my hardrive acting as the maximum amount of Virtual memory that I am allowed.

In the drawing I have converted all the window symbols to groups and purged all the resources from the drawing (or a copy thereof)

This brings the File size down to 802 kb...tiny.

The smallest drawing I have on my computer.

Still she crashes. Oh one more thing, the crashes happen mostly when I am moving an object by selecting and dragging. Not always but mostly. This crash is reliable enough that I can test the various extension on/off combinations by selecting an object in the drawing and dragging it around until the program freezes.

Usually forcing VW to quit gets me back into an operating operating system.

I'm stuck.

Sorry I keep bringing this up but I am truly stuck. I will keep trying things, but if anybody has a suggestion please let me know. Also if it is, as I suspect, the hatching, is there a work around?

Oh yes....VW 8.5.2, MacOS 9.2.2

Mac G4, 256 MB RAM 20 GB HD

ATI video card stuff.

Previous suggestions included: turning on and upping virtual memory and the memory allocated to VW (done and done);

Updating OS to 9.2.2 (done);

Updating ATI graphics vards drivers (done);

Checking for conflicts in extensions (done);

corrupted symbols definitions (don't know how to check this but as mentioned I have converted all symbols to groups and deleted the definitions);

The one thing I haven't done is delete all my hatching and I am about to try that.

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Joe,

Have you sent the file to any friend(s) and let them try it on their system? If the problem is in the file, it should cause problems on another system, but if the problem is on your computer, the file should open elsewhere.

If you would like, I could try it on my machine for you. I am very unbusy right now and can offer you a good bit of my time. I am also running VW 8.5.2 on a G4/500 MHz DP, OS 9.0.4 with 1GB RAM.

Good luck,

Raymond

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I did Titnaium, er I mean Titanium, I did this too and it crashed as I was doing it... The new drawing crashed.

I have labouriously changed all my wall areas into specific classes with hatches assigned to each. I will see how that works.

I answer to the question about whether it is computer specific...no it isn't

The same drawing chrashes on any given computer in our office, and I have 5 to choose from. Thanks for the suggestions though.

On the other hand, These drawings never crash my PC at home. ever. Unfortunately its at home.

...

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Joe,

Welcome back from spectre land. Here's another shot in the dark. Do you think it may be font related? Do you have differences in the fonts on the two platforms?

It's funny you reappeared today. The hyperlinks are changing color on the BB when they are read where they never changed before. It makes it a lot easier to read now.

Best wishes,

Raymond

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Katie: I am getting no error messages. The program simply stops responding. The mouse still moves around by which sign I know the computer hasn't gone down, only the proram. However I can only get back into Finder by forcing VW to quit.

Occasionally the computer will freeze. This calls for a reboot.

The program freeze happens on average, every minute when I am working in a problem drawing. this barely gives me time to save. I can make two or three moves and then save them and maybe make one more before she goes tits up.

Just to give you an idea.

The computer freez happens maybe once every 10 or fifteen program freezes. Again, no message. Its not unlike my dog who sometimes just loses interest in you regardless of where you are scratching you and wanders off to chew on a sock. (that often calls for a re-boot too, but for those I use my steel toe kodiaks)

Fonts..... Well fonts may be corrupt or they may not be I don't know. Fonts are probably the least understood bit of Macs for me. Telling me to check my fonts is like telling me to manipulate my genes. where do I start eh???

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Or scratch her, whioch is what I meant to say.

Katie: second part of your question, I can make the problem drawing crash every time just by grabbing something and dragging it around for a bit. If the auto scrolling feature takes me off the screen then I am sure to crash. However this is not the only thing that causes a crash. And it doesn't necessarily crash right away when I do the drag thing, but it will eventually crash.

Sometimes if I crash while moving something and restart VW and go back into the same drawing and try to do the same thing again it will crash in exactly the same part of the move.

The idiosyncrasies are endless.

Incedentally, since starting this thread, which I admit hass been going on a bit too long simply because I enjoy hearing myself type, I have turned off the hatch in the latest problem drawing and have had no further crashes. This is not to say it won't crash in the future bbut I will keep you posted.

Also.... I may not ever have to ask another stupid question or bring up any more painful and unsolvable problems because I think the powers that be are going to buy me VW 10 [big Grin]

NO MORE WORRIES!!!!!!!!! [smile]

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Whoa ... VW 10?

I think you'll be pleasantly impressed with it. Although, there is a slight learning curve between the two which will take a little time to get used to. We'll be here to help if you need it.

As for the 852 problem --

What do you have allocated for VW for the min and preferred settings?

Do you usually have other progs running while VW is running?

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Joe

I'm wondering about your memory set-up. Do all the machines have the same thing?

8.5.2 is rock solid on my G4. I don't use virtual memory, I have 200 megs for V-works out of 640 available. I've found that larger ram allotments don't do anything for Vworks and that everything runs faster without VM.

If I had 256 ram I'd give v-works around 125 and turn off VM. You need to leave plenty of ram for the system, who's requirements will vary depending on what you're doing. Maybe you're choking the system a bit by giving Vworks such a large ram partition.

Sorry if you've heard this all before....

[ 10-09-2002, 11:34 PM: Message edited by: ccroft ]

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Joe,

Okay you are probably crashing alot due to the memory settings. If you have 256 mb of RAM, you shouldn't need VM on nor should you have your min and preferred set to numbers as high as you do.

Try this -

Set the minimum to the same as the suggested.

Set the Preferred to about 150,000.

Restart the computer and see if it's still crashing.

THe problem with allocating too much mem to an application is you need to be able to leave memory for the system and any other applications running.

Virtual Memory requires free hard drive space to run. This can lead to slowing overall system performance.

With 256mb of RAM, you shouldn't need VM turned on. I would leave it off for now .. If you need it turned on at a later date, we can go from there.

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As Jack Nicholson said in "A Few Good Men"

....

"Well, I feel like a stupid idiot" at least that's the way they dubbed it.

Thanks I'll try that and get back to you.

Bear in mind, I truned VM on because someone said to. I also upped my memory allocation because some one said to.

I am very impressionable.

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There's not much harm in 'upping' your memory, however you can "up" it too much which will cause problems just as you describe.

Personally, I'd leave VM turned off unless you really really need more memory to run VW.

I have never seen VW 8 need more than 150mb setting for the preferred.

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Sometimes, VectorWorks crashes because of corrupted documents. Those corrupted documents can also cause printing problems.

The best solution always is to create a new document and to create a workgroup reference (witch will be deleted immediately) in order to import all the layers and stuff.

It worked for me today?

urimevs

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Joe,

Set the min to the same as the suggested.

Then set the preffered to about 150,000.

I wouldn't go any higher than 200,000 with only 256 mb of RAM.

Turn VM off.

Turn off the computer for 2 minutes. Then start it back up.

Do you normally turn the computer off each day or every few days?

Launch VW and work in a new, blank document to see if you get the error.

If not, try copying and pasting to a new document as the file itself might be problematic.

Finally, an error type 3 can also be an extension conflict. Try setting your extension set to base extensions and restarting. If you notice extensions in the extension set currently being used, that you don't need or no longer use, I suggest removing them. Extensions just absorb emmory that could be used for the system or even VW.

Also, if you have any other programs running, turn them off until the crashing issue is straightened out.

How large is the file you are working with?

If you still have problems, email me and I'll get to the bottom of it off the board. It might be a faster resolution process. (tech@nemetschek.net attn katie)

[ 10-14-2002, 09:02 AM: Message edited by: Katie ]

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Do you ever run Norton Utilities on your computer. With pre-OS X operating systems, files and programs can get fragmented so easily. I have found that if I were having a problem with a particular file or with Vectorworks in general, I run Disk Doctor and Speed Disk to defrag the computer and this usually takes care of the problem if all else fails. Even the Vectorworks app. file can become corrupt itself.

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