computer jamming up-help!

[davewest]

I work on ecabs every day and it seems like at about midday after working on eCabs for a few hours, the program has a tendency to lock up and not allow me to save a job. Sometime I have a job with 15 pages in Line Drawing Editor and it slows down considerably. Do you have any tips on how to manage my pages or speed things up? Even entering text in a drawing slows down like molasses when I have that many pages going.

I try to save frequently and some times I cannot save without it locking up. I have 2G of RAM and a pisser graphics card 512mb. Not sure if anyone can offer any advice. Thanks
Dave West

[DanEpps]

...I have a job with 15 pages in Line Drawing Editor and it slows down considerably...

Try to keep the number of line drawings to the bare minimum. As you generate drawings, save them as a PDF using something like PrimoPDF and delete them from the job.

[davewest]

Is there any way I can save the line drawings in smaller batches within eCabs so I can edit the drawings if necessary? The pdf trick sounds great except I cannot edit them. Thanks
Dave

[DanEpps]

A lot of folks save the "working" job without any drawings so it can be modified without the issues you are seeing. Then they copy the job and save it as a "drawing" job for drawings.

In the "drawing" job, remove items like knobs, pulls, dovetail drawer boxes and moldings (especially rope molding) where possible--anything not needed for the drawings. These items consume a lot of memory and will slow processing substantially.

[Kerry Fullington]

Dave,

I don't have an answer to the problem but what I do is about every couple of hours I save my job, shut down eCabinets then completely shut down Windows (Not just a re-start) and then fire up the computer again. It is a pain but it seems to help some. It seems like eCabinets commits things to memory and then it can't get cleared out until you completely shut down windows. I am upgrading to 4 gig of memory. I can stick 8 gig in this box but somewhere I read that XP won't use all of that. Maybe Dan can expound on that.

Kerry

[DanEpps]

...I can stick 8 gig in this box but somewhere I read that XP won't use all of that. Maybe Dan can expound on that...

This is correct...Windows can only address 4GB of physical RAM and 4GB of virtual address space (address space, not virtual memory). Here is the Microsoft page explaining Windows memory limits.

[Dean Fehribach]

Wow, Dan, that's pretty technical. To sum up, you can have up to 4GB in a standard 32-bit Windows environment, but Windows will "steal" about 512MB up to 1GB for addressing the video card and other devices. So, 4GB RAM will typically yield 3 - 3.5GB of usable memory.

[DanEpps]

Wow, Dan, that's pretty technical...

Yeah, and hard to understand too!

To make matters ever worse, MS added the PAE (physical address extension) that allows memory over 4GB. Does it really work? Don't know.

[Kerry Fullington]

So how much RAM should I install to make eCabinets purr like a kitten an never sow down.

Kerry

[Dean Fehribach]

A 32-bit process like ecabinets.exe can only address 2GB of RAM anyway. So to achieve maximum effectiveness, you'd need at least 3GB, but some technical issues like bus speed affect even the performance of RAM itself.