External Hard drive to stop laptop speed issues??

overthebar1

Hey,
I am required for college to install Solidworks (a large CAD package) to my laptop. This may be a bit of a problem for me as my computer isn't really built for that kind of program. The laptop slows down considerably when I have any demanding program installed to it so I can only imagine how bad it would be after installing Solidworks..
So i'm just wondering would buying an external hard drive and running it from that solve my problems??? I have no idea so thought I better ask here before I go out and buy one.
Thanks in advance

Jagle

first off if its a USB hard drive i doubt it, USB has terrible constant speeds and while i would run music or movies from one i wouldnt run a large software program from one.
what are the specs of your laptop and does it have a firewire 400 or 600 port do you know?

tagoona

Is the cad package graphics, cpu, memory or disk intensive?

If anything, installing to an external drive will slow down disk activity.

I know you can use an usb flash drive to increase memory, but I don't know how effective it is.Something like http://cnettv.cnet.com/8301-13415_53-10121584-11.html

If it's graphics intensive, theres not much you can do, but graphics shouldn't be a problem.

If cpu is a problem, can you check your power settings, make sure that the cpu isn't being throttled to save power.

pwd

If your hard drive is almost full, then you would not have much disk space available to use as virtual memory, so making more space on the disk would improve that yes. If you have more than 4GB or so free, then it is unlikely to make a difference.

In general, the cheapest and easiest way to speed up a computer is to add RAM. How much RAM do you have installed?

seamus

tagoona wrote: »

If cpu is a problem, can you check your power settings, make sure that the cpu isn't being throttled to save power.

This is a useful one to check. Most laptops have power settings to throttle all kinds of stuff when it's plugged out, so they run noticeably slower on battery than when plugged in.

tagoona

I meant to say as well, a good run through with Spybot S&D and a defragmenter could speed up a laptop by clearing up an awful lot of clutter.

Capt'n Midnight

What are the recommended specs for that version of solidworks - ask the college

if your laptop only meets the minimum spec then it will be slow

check specs for RAM , CPU , (and video card if doing 3D work)



if your laptop feels slower than when you bought it then check for malware too but Moores' law means that a new hardware will usually complretely wipe the floor with hardware a few years old

overthebar1

Hey guys thanks for the replies.
I should have probably made it clearer earlier that the program is not being run from a disk but by memory. We have to take the folders from the college computers and install to our own laptops and we are given the product key so no disk is required. I don't know if that makes much of a difference.
As for my computer, When I bought it it had 3Gb of memory and 250Gb hard drive.. I don't know how to check how much memory is left on the machine but I'm pretty sure it has plenty memory, I think it's the processor is the problem tbh. It is an AMD Athlon processor. The make of the laptop is Acer Emachine.
I'm pretty sure that we were told that the Solidworks program is 5Gb.
Not too sure if any of that information is helpful but I don't really know much about this kind of stuff.
Thanks for everyones help

Capt'n Midnight

so it has 3GB of ram and it's an acer emachine with an amd processor

model number would be handy


depends on which version of windows / which version of solid works you have

http://www.solidworks.com/sw/support/SystemRequirements.html

RAM
* Minimum: 1GB RAM
* Recommended: 6GB RAM or more on Windows 7 x64 operating system


(11) CPU must support SSE2 (Streaming SIMD Extensions 2).

it's 3D so you should check the laptop here
http://www.solidworks.com/sw/support/videocardtesting.html

overthebar1

Its Windows Vista too btw...

I'm not really familiar with the works of external hard drives either so I don't know if they take much pressure off the laptop or not.
Just hoping that it will help prevent the laptop from slowing down considerably

Oh and its Solidworks 2010 too btw

pwd

overthebar1 wrote: »

Its Windows Vista too btw...

I'm not really familiar with the works of external hard drives either so I don't know if they take much pressure off the laptop or not.
Just hoping that it will help prevent the laptop from slowing down considerably

Oh and its Solidworks 2010 too btw

look up an article on turning off vista services.
By default it runs loads of redundant services.

lmimmfn

move all your data to an external drive and keep all programs on the laptop and uninstall any crap on the laptop that you dont need. Defrag it. Disable Superfetch( throttles the harddrive on startup and uses all available ram to cache favourite progs, problem is takes forever to load that 2-3Gig from a laptop drive ) and ReadyBoost( pointless if youve no USB mem stick and pointless anyway unless youve a really good one, either way limited to 33-36Meg a second )

ED E

No matter what you do I suspect it'll be a nightmare to use. Solidworks is a bit of a behemoth and just wont play well with low spec machines.

IMO you'd be better off doing what you need to do on college desktops.

bud1970

3gig ram and 250gig hd sounds ok to run solidworks. my desktop system has a amd x2 2gig processor, 2 gig ram and a 250gig hd and it ran solidworks perfectly, (my son had to install it for his leaving cert)
so you shouldn't have problems on your machine, download ccleaner and run it, then do a full virus/spyware sweep, use avg and spybot s&d for that. reboot, then move all your pics, music, vids etc over to removeable media of some sort. install solidworks and then it should run ok. HTH