As you might know, the next year Microsoft is removing support for Windows 7. This means that slowly everyone will be forced to upgrade to a new version of OS.

We decided to perform the upgrade now, before the next big project begins. We upgraded our workstations to Windows 10 and installed SolidWorks 2019. Everything worked fine until I opened a project in SolidWorks…I was shocked…SolidWorks was useless! I was expecting a little performance drop, but not this much. For example, when creating a new file, the templates window took a whole minute to appear. The performance test confirmed my observations…I have never seen such bad results before. 

At first, I assumed it was a graphic card driver problem. We are still using HP Z420 workstation with Nvidia K4000 and SolidWorks just removed both from the certified list…this seemed fishy to me. We were already getting used to the thought that we will need to buy new workstations .

But luck was on our side this time. Fortunately, my LinkedIn contact Desiree Villeneuve sent me some tricks that could help and they did!

Here are the results:

As you see there was a huge difference in the performance test. The latest test results are comparable to what we had before on Windows 7 and SolidWorks 2018.

Because I heard that other people are also encountering similar problems, I decided to share this info here.

So, here are the steps we performed to enhance performance:

1. We turned off all security programs and firewall...in our case this was Windows Security and Malwarebytes. We also set User Account Settings to the minimum.
2. We deactivated SolidWorks license.
3. We uninstalled SolidWorks.
4. We made sure the folder C:\ProgramData\FLEXnet was empty. If in your case it isn't empty, make a safety copy of the files to your desktop, and delete the files in the FLEXnet folder.
5. We restarted the system.
6. We turned off all security programs and firewall again.
7. We closed all applications that were running in the background and we didn't need at the time (Skype, Dropbox, etc.).
8. We installed SolidWorks as administrator (right click on the install icon).
9. We restarted the system again and turned back security programs and firewall.
10. We added exclusions in our security programs. See below.

So, the next time you are installing SolidWorks make sure you turn off your antivirus (Windows Security) program! If possible, close as many applications as you can to make sure they don't interfere with the installation process. And after the install, don't forget to add the exclusions for SolidWorks files, SolidWorks program and Windows Defender.

p.s. one more thing…if you have a Windows 7 license, you can still upgrade to Windows 10 for free! For more visit: https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/software-download/windows10