<SNIP A LOT> Michael,
First lets get something straight, I take offence at your questioning my competence with Protel, I've been using it for a very long time and am familiar with all of its usual weird behaviours (even though they are still unacceptable) The only reason we are using it at all, and not the latest Orcad (which we also have and use) is down to my experience with Protel. Protel crashes, its protel's fault (even you admit that). As for not using the bits that crash, I find the inability to print, save or load a file a bit of an inconvenience. And as for missing and misplaced entities on plots, well that's to be expected these days.... nothings perfect. Ok, yes I admit its got much better (so far as features go) since P98, but at the expense of repeatable stability. ---------(A bit of background - you don't need to read this bit) Our first dedicated cad machine was a 1GHz P4 with 1G RAM, it *ONLY* runs Protel and win2K. We bought this as protel was pausing for more than 30 seconds per pin as a result of an edit of through hole components, it was also crashing many times a day. EDA UK confirmed both these bugs and passed our design to Protel for investigation. It seems that the crashing is usually down to known problems when you have a very large design >1000 components, many polys (these are the killer) and many tracks on a mixed through hole / smt design. The other problem is down to a bug with the on-line poly repour it seems to take ages when you have a large number of polys. All we do know is that an 1 hours lost work of one of our engineers costs more than an extra gig of ram. A newer machine was bought for a 2nd engineer. This is a dual processor 1.7GHz P4 with 1.5G RAM (at the time the fastest we could sensibly afford) Initially on the new machine all printing activity from within Protel would cause a crash, from experience we know that protel is very sensitive to graphics cards (surely not the fault of protel), so changing it sorted some of the crashes (its now the same as the first machine) ---------------------------- Protel still crashes, so what's going on? Probably a fault of the IT guy who (despite my advice) wants lots of patches installed under windows, even if there is no visible problem, anyway that's his problem..... So where am I going? Ah yes, Michael, as you machine seems to be so stable, perhaps you could tell everyone its build as its seems you've got it right. J. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * To post a message: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] * * To leave this list visit: * http://www.techservinc.com/protelusers/leave.html * * Contact the list manager: * mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] * * Forum Guidelines Rules: * http://www.techservinc.com/protelusers/forumrules.html * * Browse or Search previous postings: * http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected] * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
