The Engineer Who Spent $8,000 on Hardware and Still Had Slow Software
Jessica’s workstation was a beast. 128GB RAM. NVIDIA Quadro RTX 5000. Dual SSDs in RAID 0. Intel Xeon processor with 16 cores. The IT department’s masterpiece.
Yet her SolidWorks assemblies crawled. Opening files: 8 minutes. Rotating views: 2-3 second lag. Creating drawings: 20+ minutes. Her colleague Mark, with a three-year-old laptop with 32GB RAM, opened the same assemblies in 45 seconds.
“Your settings are garbage,” Mark told her one day, after watching her wait five minutes for a view to rotate.
“Settings?” Jessica was offended. “I have the best hardware in the building. Hardware is the problem.”
Mark pulled up a chair. “Hardware is 20% of performance. Your settings are the other 80%. Want me to show you?”
That afternoon changed Jessica’s entire workflow. What she learned wasn’t in any SolidWorks training course. It was accumulated wisdom from engineers who’d suffered through slow performance and emerged with solutions that didn’t require IT approval or capital expenditure.
This is the story of how Jessica went from $8,000 of frustrated hardware to optimized performance—by changing settings that cost nothing but understanding.
The Performance Trade-Off Nobody Explains
Mark started with a truth that shocked Jessica: “Every pretty thing you see on screen is stealing performance.”
He opened Jessica’s System Options and started pointing:
“See these view transitions?” He gestured at the slider set to “Fast.” “Every time you rotate your model, SolidWorks calculates intermediate positions to make it look smooth. Pretty, right? Also completely unnecessary and stealing processing power.”
He slid it to “Off.”
“Those thumbnail graphics in Windows Explorer? Nice for browsing files, terrible for performance. Every time you open a dialog, Windows generates those thumbnails. For assemblies, that means loading geometry just to show a preview you glance at for half a second.”
He unchecked “Show thumbnail graphics in Windows Explorer.”
“Latest news feeds? You’re letting SolidWorks fetch internet content and display it every time you open a file. That’s network bandwidth and CPU cycles going to news instead of design work.”
Unchecked.
“Freeze bar? This one is actually good—keep it enabled. It lets you freeze features and prevent unnecessary rebuilding.”
Already checked. Good.
Jessica watched, skeptical. “These tiny things make a difference?”
“Individually? Small. Combined? Massive. Performance isn’t one big problem with one big solution. It’s a thousand small inefficiencies that accumulate into catastrophic slowness.”
Mark’s philosophy: “If it makes the display prettier but doesn’t make you a better engineer, turn it off.”
The Image Quality Revelation
Mark opened Jessica’s part template and navigated to Document Properties → Image Quality.
The slider was all the way to the right. “High (slower)” it read.
“This,” Mark said, “is why your computer hates you.”
He showed her a technical diagram of how SolidWorks renders curved surfaces:
Low Quality: Surface divided into a few large triangles
High Quality: Same surface divided into hundreds of tiny triangles
“When you move that slider from Low to High, SolidWorks calculates over 2,500 times more triangles. For a single surface. Multiply that by every curved surface in your assembly—thousands of surfaces—and you’re rendering millions of triangles that are invisible to your eye.”
Jessica looked at her screen. The parts looked… fine. Smooth. Professional.
Mark slid the quality down two or three tick marks from the left. “Set it as far left as you can tolerate. Usually two or three marks from the left is enough.”
He rebuilt the part. It looked… identical to Jessica’s eyes.
“But it’s not rendering 2.5 million triangles anymore. It’s rendering maybe 100,000. Your graphics card just got its life back.”
The critical detail Mark emphasized: “In assemblies, each component’s image quality is controlled by its own document properties. That checkbox—’Apply to all referenced part documents’—lets you change every part to the same lower resolution at once.”
Jessica checked it. Applied. The assembly—all 2,847 components—regenerated at lower quality.
The difference in visual quality? Barely noticeable.
The difference in performance? Her rotate lag dropped from 3 seconds to 0.2 seconds.
The Drawing Settings That Cost Hours
“How long do your drawings take to open?” Mark asked.
“Eight to twelve minutes for assembly drawings,” Jessica said. “I make coffee while I wait.”
Mark opened System Options → Drawings.
“You have ‘Show contents while dragging drawing view’ enabled. Every time you move a view, SolidWorks updates the graphics in real time. Looks smooth. Also recalculates everything continuously while you drag.”
Unchecked.
“‘Allow auto-update when opening drawings.’ Every single view updates when you open the drawing. If you have twelve views and half are out of date, you’re forcing twelve updates before you can even start work. Clear this, and views won’t update until you manually rebuild.”
Unchecked.
“‘Automatically hide components on view creation.’ SolidWorks calculates which components aren’t visible in each view and hides them. Great for clean views. Terrible for performance—it’s calculating visibility for every component in every view.”
This was already off in Large Assembly Mode, but Mark checked to make sure.
“‘Save tessellated data for shaded views.’ This saves pre-calculated rendering data with the drawing file. Reduces file size, speeds up opening. Enable it.”
Checked.
Then Mark showed her the Display Style setting. “When creating new views, use ‘Draft quality.’ Not high quality. Draft. You can always change specific views to high quality for final deliverables, but working views should be draft.”
He changed the background appearance to “Plain” instead of gradient. “Gradients have to be recalculated as the viewpoint changes. Plain backgrounds don’t.”
Jessica’s next drawing opened in 90 seconds instead of 12 minutes.
Her coffee got cold that day because she didn’t need to leave her desk.
The Large Assembly Mode That Automates Everything
Mark navigated to System Options → Assemblies.
“See this setting? ‘Use Large Assembly Mode to improve performance when the assembly contains more than this number of components.’ What’s your threshold?”
Jessica’s was set to 500.
“That’s conservative. But here’s what matters—when Large Assembly Mode activates, it automatically adjusts a bunch of settings to improve performance.”
He showed her the options that activate:
- Don’t save auto-recover info (saves time, but less protection)
- Hide all planes, axes, sketches, curves, annotations
- Don’t display edges in shaded mode (massive performance boost)
- Suspend automatic rebuild
“‘Suspend automatic rebuild’ is controversial,” Mark explained. “The assembly won’t recalculate after every change. You make several changes, then manually rebuild once. Great for speed. Bad if you make an error—it’s harder to trace because the assembly hasn’t been rebuilding incrementally.”
Jessica had been fighting automatic rebuilds for months. Every small change triggered a five-minute rebuild.
“For working sessions, suspend automatic rebuild. Make your changes. Then Ctrl+Q to force rebuild when you’re ready. If there’s an error, undo recent changes and rebuild again.”
Mark also showed her the Large Design Review threshold: “Set to 5000 components. When an assembly exceeds this, you can open it in Large Design Review mode—view-only, super fast, perfect for reviewing designs without needing to edit.”
The External References Time Bomb
“This setting,” Mark said, pointing at System Options → External References, “determines whether opening assemblies takes 30 seconds or 30 minutes.”
He explained the minefield:
“Open referenced documents with read-only access” — Prevents accidental changes to components. Essential for teams.
“Don’t prompt to save read-only referenced documents” — Saves time and prevents frustration. You can’t save them anyway; don’t waste time being asked.
“Load referenced documents” — Set to “Prompt.” This lets you selectively load references as needed instead of loading everything automatically.
“Search file locations for external references” — THIS IS THE KILLER.
“See this checkbox?” Mark pointed. “If enabled, every time you open an assembly, SolidWorks searches every specified file location looking for referenced files. If you have network drives or multiple search paths, it’s searching hundreds of folders across the network.”
He showed Jessica her file locations. She had twelve paths listed, including three network drives.
“With this checkbox enabled, opening your assembly means SolidWorks searches twelve locations for every referenced file. For 2,847 components, that’s potentially 34,164 folder searches. Across a network. At the start of every file open.”
Jessica’s jaw dropped. “So that’s why opening files on Monday mornings takes forever—everyone’s hitting the network at once.”
“Exactly. Only enable ‘Search file locations’ when you’re trying to locate improperly moved files. Otherwise, leave it OFF.”
Unchecked. Her next assembly open time dropped by eight minutes.
The Transparency Trap
Mark opened System Options → Performance.
“Transparency is expensive,” he said. “To accurately display what’s behind transparent surfaces, SolidWorks has to order every surface, render front and back faces, calculate colors. It’s computationally intensive.”
He showed her the transparency quality settings:
- High quality for normal view mode
- High quality for dynamic view mode
“Both set to high quality?”
Jessica nodded.
“Try this: Lower quality for dynamic view mode. When you rotate, pan, or zoom—when the view is moving—transparency renders at lower quality. Faster. When you stop moving, it switches back to high quality. You get speed while working, quality when stopped.”
He changed dynamic view mode to lower quality.
The difference was immediate. Rotating assemblies with transparent components went from laggy to smooth.
The Level of Detail Slider Nobody Touches
“This slider,” Mark said, pointing to “Level of detail” in the Performance options, “controls what displays while you’re moving the assembly.”
He slid it all the way to the right.
“At maximum, smaller components become simplified blocks while you pan, zoom, or rotate. When you stop moving, they return to normal. Your graphics card renders way fewer triangles during movement.”
Jessica tried it. Rotating her 2,847-part assembly, she watched small fasteners temporarily become simple boxes during rotation, then snap back to detailed geometry when she stopped.
“Looks weird,” she said.
“Looks fast,” Mark countered. “And you’re only seeing the simplified view while moving. When you’re actually examining details, it’s full quality.”
Other settings Mark adjusted:
- “Automatically load components lightweight” — Depends on assembly size. For large assemblies, this loads components as lightweight (envelope only) automatically.
- “Check out-of-date lightweight components” → “Indicate” — Flags components that need updating without forcing updates.
- “Resolve lightweight components” → “Always” — Auto-resolves when needed for specific tasks.
- “Rebuild assembly on load” → “Always” — Forces rebuild when opening to ensure geometry is current.
- “Mate animation speed” → OFF — Don’t waste cycles calculating intermediate positions during mating.
- “No Preview During Open” — Skip the preview window when opening files to dedicate more memory to actually loading the file.
The Verification That Saves and Kills
Mark showed Jessica a critical toggle in Performance options: “Verification on rebuild”
“When enabled, this checks every face in your model against every other face. Comprehensive error checking. Also incredibly slow.”
He explained the trade-off:
Verification ON: Every face checked against all faces. Finds errors early. Rebuild takes 10x longer.
Verification OFF: Each face only checked against immediate neighbors. Faster. Might miss errors until later.
“My recommendation: Turn verification OFF for daily work. Once a week, turn it ON, do a forced rebuild (Ctrl+Q) to check for errors, then turn it back OFF.”
This became Jessica’s Friday afternoon ritual. Clean verification run before the weekend, then back to fast rebuilds for the week.
The Windows Settings Nobody Considers
“SolidWorks settings are half the battle,” Mark said. “Windows settings are the other half.”
He opened Jessica’s Windows settings:
Visual Effects: Set to “Adjust for best appearance”
Mark changed it to “Adjust for best performance.”
“All those pretty menu effects, window shadows, animations—they’re using GPU and CPU resources. Resources SolidWorks could be using instead.”
The change made Windows look… less fancy. Menus snapped instead of sliding. No shadows. No transparency effects.
But SolidWorks immediately felt snappier.
Search Indexing: Set to “Always index”
“Windows is constantly indexing your files in the background. When you’re trying to work on a large assembly, Windows is competing for disk I/O and CPU cycles.”
Mark changed it to “Index only when computer is idle.”
“Let Windows index during lunch breaks and overnight. During design time, dedicate resources to design.”
The System Maintenance Nobody Performs
Mark opened SolidWorks Rx—a tool built into SolidWorks that Jessica had never used.
“This is SolidWorks’ system diagnostic and maintenance tool. Most people never touch it.”
He showed her two critical tabs:
Diagnostics Tab
This scanned Jessica’s system and highlighted issues:
- Graphics driver out of date
- Insufficient RAM allocated (fixable in settings)
- Search indexing running during work hours
- Unnecessary add-ins enabled
Each issue had a suggested fix.
System Maintenance Tab
“This is a one-stop shop for maintenance tasks.”
Mark showed her the checklist:
- Clean SolidWorks backup directory
- Clean SolidWorks temporary directories
- Clean Windows temp directory
- Clean temporary internet files
- Run checkdisk to check for disk errors
- Run Windows Defragmenter
“You can run these immediately, schedule them for specific times, or set them to run regularly.”
Mark scheduled them for 2 AM every Saturday. Jessica’s computer would automatically clean up temporary files, defragment drives, and perform maintenance while she slept.
“Temporary files accumulate. SolidWorks creates temporary files constantly. If your temp directories are full, SolidWorks struggles to save temporary data. It’s like trying to work at a desk covered in papers—everything takes longer.”
The cleanup recovered 47GB of disk space from temporary files alone.
The Add-Ins Eating Resources
Mark opened Tools → Add-Ins.
Jessica had twelve add-ins enabled. She used two of them.
“Every add-in consumes system resources—RAM, CPU cycles, startup time. If you’re not using them, turn them off.”
Mark showed her which add-ins were critical (SolidWorks Toolbox, maybe PDM Connector) and which were optional (everything else unless specifically needed for current projects).
Jessica disabled ten add-ins she’d never consciously used.
SolidWorks startup time dropped from 45 seconds to 12 seconds.
The Template That Makes It Permanent
“Here’s the problem,” Mark said. “You’ve optimized your system options. But document properties live in your templates. If your templates have bad settings, every new file you create inherits those bad settings.”
He opened Jessica’s part template.
Image quality: High (slider all the way right)
Save tessellation: Unchecked
Verification on rebuild: Enabled
“Every new part you create starts with slow settings. You need to fix your templates.”
Mark showed her how:
- Open each template (part, assembly, drawing)
- Set document properties correctly (image quality, verification settings, etc.)
- Save the template
- Now every NEW file inherits optimized settings
For existing files, Jessica would need to update them manually or use the “Apply to all referenced part documents” option in assemblies.
The Copy Settings Wizard That Preserves Everything
“Last thing,” Mark said. “After optimizing your system options, save them.”
He opened the Copy Settings Wizard (Start → All Programs → SolidWorks Tools → Copy Settings Wizard).
“This saves your system options, keyboard shortcuts, menu customization, toolbar layout as a registry file. If SolidWorks crashes, if Windows updates reset things, if you get a new computer—you can restore everything instantly.”
Mark created a backup file: “Jessica_SolidWorks_Settings_Optimized_2024.reg”
“Keep this somewhere safe. When disaster strikes—and it will—you’ll restore optimized settings in 30 seconds instead of spending hours reconfiguring.”
The Results
Jessica’s transformation took one afternoon. No hardware upgrades. No software purchases. Just settings adjustments based on understanding the trade-offs between visual quality and performance.
Before optimization:
- Assembly open time: 8 minutes
- Rotate/pan lag: 2-3 seconds
- Drawing creation: 20 minutes
- Rebuild time: 5 minutes
- Daily productivity: ~50% (4 hours waiting, 4 hours working)
After optimization:
- Assembly open time: 45 seconds
- Rotate/pan lag: <0.2 seconds
- Drawing creation: 90 seconds
- Rebuild time: 12 seconds
- Daily productivity: ~95% (20 minutes waiting, 7 hours 40 minutes working)
Time reclaimed per day: 3 hours 40 minutes
Time reclaimed per year: 920 hours
Value at $75/hour loaded cost: $69,000 per year
Her $8,000 workstation didn’t get faster. She just stopped asking it to do unnecessary work.
The Philosophy That Changed Everything
Mark’s final wisdom: “Performance is about what you choose NOT to do.”
Every pretty animation is a choice to prioritize appearance over speed.
Every verification check is a choice to prioritize certainty over efficiency.
Every automatic update is a choice to prioritize currency over control.
None of these choices are wrong. But they’re choices. And most people never realize they’re making them because the defaults prioritize appearance and safety over performance.
The professional approach:
- Work fast with verification off, lightweight components, simplified configurations
- Check thoroughly once per week with verification on, all components resolved
- Deliver with high quality settings for final renderings and client presentations
- Archive with optimized settings for long-term storage
Match your settings to your current task. Working? Speed. Checking? Thoroughness. Presenting? Quality.
The Colleague Who Never Learned
Six months later, IT upgraded everyone’s workstations. 256GB RAM. Latest GPUs. Fastest processors available.
Jessica’s colleague Steven got the same hardware upgrade. His assemblies still took eight minutes to open.
“Hardware problem,” Steven insisted. “These new computers are somehow slower.”
Jessica didn’t argue. She just smiled and opened her 4,200-part assembly in 38 seconds while Steven’s 2,100-part assembly loaded for seven minutes.
Some engineers buy faster computers. Smart engineers configure the computers they have.
The Quick-Start Optimization Checklist
If you only have 15 minutes, change these settings first (biggest impact):
System Options:
- General: Uncheck thumbnail graphics, Uncheck news feeds, Enable Freeze bar
- Drawings: Clear “show contents while dragging,” Clear “auto-update when opening”
- Assemblies: Enable Large Assembly Mode (threshold: 500), Enable Large Design Review (threshold: 5000)
- External References: Uncheck “Search file locations” (use only when finding moved files)
- Performance: Turn off verification on rebuild, Lower transparency for dynamic view, Slide level of detail to far right
- View: Set all transitions to “Off”
Document Properties (in templates):
- Image Quality: Slider 2-3 marks from left, Check “Save tessellation”
Windows:
- Visual Effects: “Adjust for best performance”
- Indexing: “Only when computer is idle”
Maintenance:
- Run SolidWorks Rx Diagnostics
- Schedule weekly cleanup of temp files
- Disable unused add-ins
15 minutes of changes = Years of faster performance
What settings transformed your SolidWorks performance? What “obvious” optimizations took you embarrassingly long to discover? Share your before-and-after stories in the comments—we all learn from each other’s “why didn’t I do this sooner” moments.
This article is part of our Engineering Design Excellence series, where we transform sluggish software into efficient tools through understanding, not spending.
