What Revit Wants
Displayed battery information includes the battery name, manufacture name, serial number, manufacture date, power state (charging/discharging), current battery capacity, full charged capacity, voltage, charge/discharge rate, and more…
Download at
BatteryInfoView – View battery information on laptops / netbooks
Original heads-up via
http://www.raymond.cc/blog/archives/2011/09/06/view-laptop-or-netbook-battery-information-with-batteryinfoview/
/X
Perform free-space consolidation. Free-space consolidation is useful if you need to shrink a volume, and it can reduce fragmentation of future files.
/T
Track an operation already in progress on the specified volume.
/H
Run the operation at normal priority instead of the default low priority. Specify this option if a computer is not otherwise in use.
/M
Defragment multiple volumes simultaneously, in parallel. This is primarily useful for computers that can access multiple disks simultaneously, such as those using SCSI- or SATA-based disks rather than disks with an IDE interface.
The Autodesk Certified Hardware page allows filtering by the products you intend to use (ie. Revit). This page should be your ‘first stop’ when installing or updating your Graphics Card / Display drivers. Once you find a Certified, Recommended driver, you can download it direct from this page.
Autodesk – Certified Hardware – Find Graphics Hardware
My main video card is a Nvidia Quadro FX 580. However, I wanted to run more than two monitors. So I borrowed a old GeForce 7300 LE and installed it into one of the other PCI-E slots on my Gigabyte EX58-UD4 motherboard.
This is NOT an SLI rig. But I can run it in a ‘hybrid mode’ where I’m essentially getting access to 4 monitors. I try to make sure that I always run my main Revit instance on the monitor that is plugged into the ‘good’ FX 580 video card.
The main lesson here is that you need to install GeForce drivers to make this all happen properly. The Quadro drivers do not seem to work very well in this hybrid setup.
I am running 275.33 drivers, which you can download from here:
GeForce 275.33 Driver
This GeForce driver also includes cool stuff like overclocking options in the Nvidia Control Panel.
Game developer David Braben has developed a $25 PC, in a USB stick with a HDMI port on one end and a USB port on the other. The hardware inside is a 700MHz ARM11 processor with 128MB of RAM, together with 1080p graphics output and Linux operation.
This solution would put a slightly different spin on ‘mobile and affordable Revit-ing’ 🙂 It sure would take some coaxing to get Revit to run on this hardware though!
Thinking of buying a new USB Flash drive? Head over to this site:
UsbFlashSpeed.com
You can also download a utility to benchmark any flash drives that you own:
download link
Interesting little exchange on Twitter recently, with regard to Revit hardware and benchmark performance:
New WHQL Nvidia drivers released 18 April 2011:
NVIDIA DRIVERS 270.61 WHQL
And here is the link to the System tools software:
http://www.nvidia.co.uk/object/nvidia_system_tools_6.06_uk.html
Here’s an idea – if you have two old but similarly sized hard drives sitting around, plug them into your Windows 7 PC and create a Striped Volume.
Striping increases the access speed of the drive.
This could be useful when working on a local version of a Revit central file – local disk access speed becomes important in this situation.
Here’s how:
Please be careful with this process – make sure you understand the pro’s and con’s. If you do, it can be a inexpensive way to increase your performance while using Revit.
This guy did a comparison on the speed of Windows 7 ‘Striping’ vs hardware RAID0 – and surprisingly, the results were similar.
RAID on the Cheap: Windows 7 Software RAID vs. inexpensive “fake RAID” � Kevin’s Blog
In order, and dependent on how large the models you wish to edit are:
