AutoCAD LT 2012 slow and unuseable. ("Help distress Call")

Just purchased HP I7 8gb ram for LT 2012 so we can open some Architects drawings on a new project. Files are 25megabites each with lots of blocks & autocad objects in them. Also lots of nasty embedded fonts. Joy.

The files are true AutoCAD .dwg files and the system cannot open them in less than 20 minutes. This also the case for zoom/regen/redraw. Imposible to work on. Have about 40 of these drawings to work on and would like to finish project before I die of old age. It does not help if I convert them to an older version and use LT2007. Some do not open correctly due to AutoCAD objects I think.

We are under contract to get them done quickly. Any help or ideas would be greatly appreciated.

25MB?? Mine are considered big and uruly and in dire need of a good Purge if they are 10MB !! I feel for ya mate.

If there is no chance of going back to wherever you got them from and smack someone on the head til you get a more working copy of the DWGs then I suggest you start with some basic PURGE, -PURGE (for the Regapps) and AUDIT and see how that affects the drawings.

It may help you to disable temporary the display of text entities - check the QTEXTMODE system variable; however this will prevent you from editing them while set to 1.

Regards,

Mircea

Do you have the AutoCAD Arch object enablers installed? How about service packs and updates?

http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/ps/dl/index?siteID=123112&id=2334435&linkID=9240818

Worth looking in to.

Turn off all unecessary processes and anti-virus. Disable InfoCenter (SEE THIS). Find out why the files are so large and work on reducing file size as much as possible.

I would echo everybody else's comments...with a file size that big, unless you are working on a full scale 3d model of the moon, I'm betting you have piles of stuff that can purge out. You will probably need to run purge more than once, as it doesn't always get everything the first time.

Got into that once on a set of floor plans, elevations, and cross sections for a custom business jet. Fifty two pages of drawings all in one file that was over 50mb. A purge took it down to 20, by the time I finished cleaning it up it was down to around 3mb. And this was all 2d stuff, too.

Thanks Guys for your input. I have so far reduced the 25mb down to 8.5mb. Will continue with all your suggestions on the rest of the drawings. Many Thanks:D

purge, overkill, audit & a baseball bat to clobber the person that made them so horrid!

with a file this out of control I suggest checking to make sure you don't have some z-coordinates, assuming this is of coarse a 2d file ......

forgot to mention "flatten"....both a command in CAD & something to do to the designer!

Flatten is not in LT Full Acad only