Administration

SOLIDWORKS Admin Portal and Online Licensing

The SOLIDWORKS Admin Portal is a cloud-based asset and service management system that lets you assign and manage online licenses.

The Admin Portal makes it easy for you to monitor SOLIDWORKS online licenses, invite members to an account, assign products and services to members, and create new administrators. You can also remove users from licenses, even when users are in remote locations.

As a SOLIDWORKS user, online licensing gives you the flexibility to use one SOLIDWORKS license across all your devices, in any location, without having to manually activate and deactivate the licenses on each machine. You must have internet access to sign in and use online licenses, but after signing in, you can select offline mode and work while the device is not connected to a network.

Copy Settings Wizard

The Copy Settings Wizard saves, restores, and propagates system settings to users, computers, or profiles.

You can launch the Copy Settings Wizard from Tools > Save/Restore Settings in the SOLIDWORKS software or click Start > ALL PROGRAMS > SOLIDWORKS > SOLIDWORKS TOOLS > Copy Settings Wizard .

Selecting Tools > Save/Restore Settings runs the Copy Settings Wizard in a special mode which allows the SOLIDWORKS software to remain up and running, while you save or restore your current user settings.

When you select options for the SOLIDWORKS software, those settings are saved in a registry file, and the software recognizes the settings from one release of SOLIDWORKS to the next. For most users, no action is necessary to maintain their settings. However, you can use the Copy Settings Wizard to distribute settings.

You can save or restore system settings for:

System options
Toolbar layout (All toolbars or Macro toolbar only)
Keyboard shortcuts
Mouse gestures
Menu customization
Saved views

You save settings to a file and then restore them to the following registries:

Profile	Registry
Current user	CURRENT_USER of current user
One or more network computers	LOCAL_MACHINE of selected computers
One or more roaming user profiles	CURRENT_USER of selected users

Only system administrators should copy settings to network computers or roaming user profiles. When you restore settings to network computers, the settings apply to new SOLIDWORKS users on the specified computers. You can restore settings to roaming user profiles only if your company uses roaming user profiles.

To prevent users from changing those options, you can use the Settings Administrator Tool to set system options that are applied when deploying or upgrading the SOLIDWORKS software.

The Settings Administrator Tool is installed with a SOLIDWORKS administrative image. You can run the tool from the location where you stored the image. For more information, see the Installation and Administration Help.

SOLIDWORKS Rx

Diagnostics

The Diagnostics tab helps you locate and download the correct graphics driver at http://www.solidworks.com/sw/support/videocardtesting.html.

Status shown in the Diagnostics tab for different system and graphics card combinations on your machine:

Machine

Status

Fields Displayed

System	Certified
Graphics Card	Certified only for previous version of SOLIDWORKS

All system and graphics card related fields

System	Not certified
Graphics Card	Certified only for previous version of SOLIDWORKS

Graphics card related information

System	Certified
Graphics Card	Out-of-date

All system and graphics card related fields

System	Certified
Graphics Card	Current

All system and graphics card related fields

If you have no internet connection, the status shows the error icon

Problem Capture

The Problem Capture tab lets you:

record a video of the problematic steps
log performance profiling data, including disk and CPU activity from running processes
write a description of the problem
and package the SOLIDWORKS files

To use the Problem Capture tab:

In Step 1, select one or both of these options:
- Record a video of the steps in SOLIDWORKS.
- Record Extended Logging Data
Click Start Capture.
If you record a video and SOLIDWORKS is not currently running, SOLIDWORKS RX starts a new session. A floating dialog box stays on top of your SOLIDWORKS session.
1. In the Capturing Problem dialog box, click Start Recording.
2. Then click Finish Recording
In Step 2, click Add Files to add parts, drawings, or assembly files into a zip file, and click Package files Now.
In Step 3, type a description of the problem and save it on your system or submit a service request, and click Continue.
Follow the prompts to complete any remaining steps.
You can rename the zip file, save it on your hard disk, and send it to the Technical Support team for evaluation.

Reliability

The Reliability tab provides information about SOLIDWORKS sessions that have terminated in the past 60 days.

To use the Reliability tab:

In the daily summary chart, click a session with an information icon . To scroll through the days in the calendar, click the left or right arrow on the side of the chart.
The color coded dots indicate the following:
- Blue dots indicate that sessions terminated normally.
- Orange dots indicate that sessions were terminated by a user.
- Red dots indicate that sessions were terminated unexpectedly.
For sessions that were terminated by a user or were terminated unexpectedly, the Session Ending section lists Windows events (for example, driver crashes or network failures) that were logged 5 minutes before termination. Click the arrow in the title bar to expand or collapse data.
For sessions that terminated unexpectedly, the Reliability tab displays a call stack of that session. A call stack is a list of calls made by the software before it terminated, with the module and memory address of each call.

This section displays how many sessions in the past 60 days have the same stack. Click the number in Sessions with the same stack to display this list. This data can help you or your VAR identify persistent issues that might be causing the software to terminate.
The tab also lists data on Windows installation events, including the installation of Windows drivers and patches.

When you create a SOLIDWORKS Rx zip file from the Problem Capture tab, data from the Reliability tab is automatically included in the zip file.

Hardware Benchmarks

The Add-in tab of the SOLIDWORKS Rx dialog box has a link to www.solidworks.com/benchmarks, where you can learn about running SOLIDWORKS and computer-related benchmarks. SOLIDWORKS benchmark performance information can help you determine if your system is qualified to run SOLIDWORKS effectively.

To run the SOLIDWORKS performance benchmark, on the Add-in tab of the SOLIDWORKS Rx dialog box, click Start Benchmark.

SOLIDWORKS Service Packs

If you are a SOLIDWORKS subscription customer, you can take advantage of SOLIDWORKS service packs that are regularly posted on the SOLIDWORKS website.

The SOLIDWORKS Installation Manager checks for downloads and installs updates. If an update is located, the SOLIDWORKS Installation Manager appears.

To check for updates manually:	In SOLIDWORKS, click > Check for Updates.
To initiate the Installation Manager manually:	In Windows, click Start > SOLIDWORKS Installation Manager > Check for Updates.
To allow the Installation Manager to check periodically:	In SOLIDWORKS, click > Check for Updates. Specify a number of days in Check for updates every `X` days, where `X` can be between 1 and 99. Click Close.
To update local help and tutorials for service packs:	SOLIDWORKS tutorials are only available as local help (.chm files). Help files are available as Web help or as local help files. These local files are excluded from service pack downloads to reduce download size and time. To ensure up-to-date tutorials and local help, you can download the files separately. Log in to the SOLIDWORKS Customer Portal. Click Downloads and Updates. Select the Version year and Product. Select a language and accept the license agreement. In the Download and Install page, click manual download method. In the Manual Install page, specify: Upgrading from Service Pack Language SolidWorks Product In the Manual Download Packages page, under Step 4, click SolidWorks Help. Run swHelp`<language>`.exe to install the help files.

SOLIDWORKS CAD Admin Dashboard

With the CAD Admin Dashboard, you can monitor the performance, hardware status, and changes to SOLIDWORKS System Options settings for each SOLIDWORKS user at your company.

1	Main dashboard
2	Dashboard toolbar

Some updates to the CAD Admin Dashboard might not be reflected in this documentation.

Benchmarking Your Hardware

You can benchmark SOLIDWORKS software performance for your machine against the performance of other SOLIDWORKS customers. You can use the benchmark results to learn how your hardware performs relative to expected benchmarks.

Do not run applications during the benchmark test.

Expect to take 30 minutes to benchmark your computer. For more information about benchmarking, click www.solidworks.com/benchmarks.

To benchmark SOLIDWORKS software performance on your machine:

Close all applications and reboot your computer.
Before you open any applications, from the Windows Start menu, click All Programs > SOLIDWORKS version > SOLIDWORKS Tools > SOLIDWORKS Performance Test.
In the SOLIDWORKS Performance Testdialog box, read the instructions and click Start.
Address any prompts that appear to complete the benchmarking.

Understanding Your Benchmark Results

While third party tools are available to test graphics, processors, and I/O, the SOLIDWORKS RX Benchmark tool tests your hardware as it functions against the SOLIDWORKS software.

Processor

This score measures how long your computer requires to complete CPU-based activities in the SOLIDWORKS software, like rebuilding features or creating drawing views. You can assume that a computer that completes this test in half the time will rebuild a part in half the time.

Since CPU is used in practically all operations, improving the CPU score with a faster processor can improve other scores as well.

Most operations in the SOLIDWORKS software use the processing power of one CPU, so the processor score will not improve much if your computer has multiple processors or cores.

Graphics

This score quantifies how smooth rotating, zooming, and panning a model would be in the SOLIDWORKS software. A fast time indicates that you would be able to zoom, pan, and rotate complex and large models with less visible lag.

Graphics manipulation depends in part on the CPU and video card. You can improve graphics performance with a faster video card and a faster CPU.

I/O

This score quantifies how long it takes to open and save files to your computer. The test measures the read and write speeds of your computer's hard drive.

This test does not account for network speeds or data management systems and is not a good indicator of open and save times for network environments.

Rendering

This score is only available if your computer has PhotoView 360 installed. It measures the time needed to complete a photo-realistic renderings of models.

PhotoView 360 does use multiple processors, if they exist. More and faster CPUs improve render times.

RealView Graphics Performance

This score is only available if your computer has a video card that supports RealView graphics. A fast time indicates that, with RealView graphics enabled, you could zoom, pan, and rotate complex and large models with little or no visible lag.

RealView graphics performance depends in part on the CPU and the video card, but with greater dependency on video card than standard graphics. You can improve RealView graphics performance with a faster video card, and a faster CPU.

Simulation

The score is only available if your computer has SOLIDWORKS Simulation installed. It measures the time to run a static analysis design study.

SOLIDWORKS Simulation does use multiple processors, if they exist. More and faster CPU’s will improve the time to run a study. SOLIDWORKS Simulation requires frequent writes to disk.