hambone79
November 17th, 2006, 06:16 PM
I know most of you don't want to listen to me complain, but I need to get this off my chest and I'm sure some of you can relate to my story...
Let me start out by telling you a little about my background and what I do. I am a mechanical engineer who works for a large corporation that makes construction equipment. I spend most of my day sitting behind a CAD workstation, but I also spend a lot of time outside of the office resolving manufacturing problems.
My CAD workstation is a dual display HP xw4200 Workstation with a NVidia Quadro FX 1300 graphics board, 2GB of RAM, and a 3.4GHz P4 Processor running Windows XP Pro. It is a few years old, but it still has pretty decent specs. Anyway, the reason I'm writing this rant is because the quality of this machine and the software I have to use on it. We use PTC Pro/Engineer for all of our CAD work and for the most part it is a great program, but some times it really drives me nuts.
For the past week I have been working on creating models for a wiring harness installation and it hasn't been going well. First of all, the HP workstation is extremely slow for the specs it has. I have stripped it down to the bare minimum software (Pro/E, Outlook, AS/400 terminal emulator), updated to the latest recommend drivers, and it still feels like it runs slower than my old IBM G40 laptop at home. Second, Pro/E likes to randomly crash for no apparent reason which causes a cascading crash that crashes every other program I have running. At this point the only option I have is to kill the computer and reboot.
This doesn't sound like that big of a deal until you consider that it takes me about 10-15 minutes just to pull in the model that I am working on. When this happens 5-6 times a day, I'm losing over an hour in time just to get the computer back up and running, not to mention the work I lose when it crashes. In a given day I'd say I probably get 4 hours of actual work done. This really pisses me off, especially since I'm not the only person involved and we have had corporate IT, HP, and PTC take a look at the problem...still don't have a solution.
The main reason it pisses me off is that I have used Pro/E on a Solaris workstation and on a Linux workstation before and I NEVER had issues with the program crashing. This leads me to believe that the root cause of my crashes is Windows XP. I also believe that Windows XP is responsible for my workstation being so slow because I have booted it from a Knoppix CD before and it seems quite fast. It still amazes me why engineering sticks with Windows when it has had such a lousy reputation in the past 5-6 years (we used to run on Solaris workstations). It also amazes me that a high end workstation can't run for more than a few hours without being rebooted when you consider that our CAD fileserver (running Linux) has been running for over 90 days straight and my workstation at home has been running for at least that long.
I think it's time for corporate IT to let engineering decide what OS to run on the CAD workstations. They will argue that the Unix/Linux workstations are too expensive when compared to the Windows workstation, but what they don't take into consideration is that we lose thousands of dollars a day in lost productivity due to a lousy OS. I say it's better to spend a little more money up front than to **** away alot more money later on.
Well, I guess I will wrap up my rant and get out of here. If anyone else has a rant similar to mine, I'd really like to hear it.
Let me start out by telling you a little about my background and what I do. I am a mechanical engineer who works for a large corporation that makes construction equipment. I spend most of my day sitting behind a CAD workstation, but I also spend a lot of time outside of the office resolving manufacturing problems.
My CAD workstation is a dual display HP xw4200 Workstation with a NVidia Quadro FX 1300 graphics board, 2GB of RAM, and a 3.4GHz P4 Processor running Windows XP Pro. It is a few years old, but it still has pretty decent specs. Anyway, the reason I'm writing this rant is because the quality of this machine and the software I have to use on it. We use PTC Pro/Engineer for all of our CAD work and for the most part it is a great program, but some times it really drives me nuts.
For the past week I have been working on creating models for a wiring harness installation and it hasn't been going well. First of all, the HP workstation is extremely slow for the specs it has. I have stripped it down to the bare minimum software (Pro/E, Outlook, AS/400 terminal emulator), updated to the latest recommend drivers, and it still feels like it runs slower than my old IBM G40 laptop at home. Second, Pro/E likes to randomly crash for no apparent reason which causes a cascading crash that crashes every other program I have running. At this point the only option I have is to kill the computer and reboot.
This doesn't sound like that big of a deal until you consider that it takes me about 10-15 minutes just to pull in the model that I am working on. When this happens 5-6 times a day, I'm losing over an hour in time just to get the computer back up and running, not to mention the work I lose when it crashes. In a given day I'd say I probably get 4 hours of actual work done. This really pisses me off, especially since I'm not the only person involved and we have had corporate IT, HP, and PTC take a look at the problem...still don't have a solution.
The main reason it pisses me off is that I have used Pro/E on a Solaris workstation and on a Linux workstation before and I NEVER had issues with the program crashing. This leads me to believe that the root cause of my crashes is Windows XP. I also believe that Windows XP is responsible for my workstation being so slow because I have booted it from a Knoppix CD before and it seems quite fast. It still amazes me why engineering sticks with Windows when it has had such a lousy reputation in the past 5-6 years (we used to run on Solaris workstations). It also amazes me that a high end workstation can't run for more than a few hours without being rebooted when you consider that our CAD fileserver (running Linux) has been running for over 90 days straight and my workstation at home has been running for at least that long.
I think it's time for corporate IT to let engineering decide what OS to run on the CAD workstations. They will argue that the Unix/Linux workstations are too expensive when compared to the Windows workstation, but what they don't take into consideration is that we lose thousands of dollars a day in lost productivity due to a lousy OS. I say it's better to spend a little more money up front than to **** away alot more money later on.
Well, I guess I will wrap up my rant and get out of here. If anyone else has a rant similar to mine, I'd really like to hear it.