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Tech Support Blog: SOLIDWORKS Upgrade Advice - Post Installation Checks

Monday November 13, 2017 at 12:14pm
After SolidWorks has been installed, these tips are useful to ensure it all runs smoothly.
Hopefully you have been able to read my previous blog post on the “Top 10 Tips for a Successful SOLIDWORKS Installation” - this blog walks you through some post-installation checks you may need to carry out.

Activation
Firstly upon launching SOLIDWORKS for the first time after a major version update (2017 to 2018 for example), you will be asked to reactivate the software. This purely is done to ensure entitlement to this version and should take a matter of seconds. If you hit any problems at this stage please contact our Customer Support team to assist in understanding why an error message may have been triggered.

System Configuration
You may then see notifications from the Windows System tray (bottom right corner of the screen near the clock). SOLIDWORKS may ask you to check the configuration of your machine. Clicking this notification alert will open the SOLIDWORKS RX tool (also accessible via the START menu) which will display your PC specification under the “Diagnostics” tab. Here you are particularly looking at the video card/driver setup where RX may alert you to either visit the website or directly download an alternative driver. Please ensure you go through this and install the certified driver for the SOLIDWORKS version you have upgraded to.

What’s New
If you haven’t been able to attend any of the live “What’s New” events, or view any of our webinars on MySolidSolutions, you can also review the updates within the software. Use Help > What’s New, where you can either show these in a PDF or HTML document, interactively show an icon when you encounter new features within the menus, or run through some tutorials.



System Options
To keep SOLIDWORKS looking consistent from year to year rather than starting a fresh with factory settings, a new SOLIDWORKS version will inherited the user profile from any previous release. This keeps your colour scheme, toolbar arrangements and mouse/keyboard shortcuts intact and familiar. However a bi-product of this which won’t be desirable is the retained settings for your file locations.  

Under Tools > Options > File Locations, there is a drop down list showing the paths SOLIDWORKS will look for template information (drawing borders, tables, weldment profiles). These are well worth checking. By default SOLIDWORKS will look in the following folders for this information, plus any customised paths you may have created yourself:

C:\ProgramData\SolidWorks\SolidWorks 20xx…
C:\Program Files\SolidWorks Corp\SolidWorks\Lang\English…*


*Note the exact path of the “Program Files” directory will be dependent on how you have installed SOLIDWORKS itself.


If like me you like to include the version/year number in the file path, you may find the File Locations for SOLIDWORKS 2018 are referring to 2017 paths. Therefore you need to change these.

By far and away the best way to do this is using a new(ish) feature which allows you to “Edit All” of the locations and use a Find > Replace technique.

You see a summary view of current paths, and new paths after making your changes. You can either then use a Find > Replace method to swap the paths over (i.e. 2017 to 2018) or manually adjust the text in the right hand column by typing. Note the find and replace will very much be dependant on the paths used for your new and old installs for SOLIDWORKS.



We hope these small tips ensure you get the best from your use of the new version of SOLIDWORKS.

By Adam Hartles
Senior Applications Engineer




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 Solid Solutions | Trimech Group

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