Pro Engineer Wildfire 5.0 Student Edition Problems

[vesh7]

Anyone else encounter the problem with Pro Engineer (happens in all Wildfire release versions) that it suddenly crashes when rotating an assembly while making constraints (offset, coincident, insert, etc...)? Is this just a problem with the Student Edition? I can confirm that it is not a computer performance related issue because I have ran it on several computers, including several laptops and high end PCs and I still encounter the same problem.

[Tristan Lall]

Pro/ENGINEER has some longstanding and complicated issues with various video card and driver combinations. Sometimes just changing the driver solves this. (PTC publishes recommended configurations that are extensively tested; everything else is a bit of a gamble.) Are all of the video cards from the same manufacturer, and maybe using the same driver release?

The sudden crash is a peculiarity of Pro/E...you're doing something, and then it just sort of blows up and disappears. Most programs will hang or display other symptoms before crashing, but Pro/E almost always just vanishes.

Unfortunately, unless something has changed recently, the student editions are relatively old datecodes (i.e. occasional releases) of Pro/E, and don't get updated along with the versions on maintenance contracts. So if it's a bug in Pro/E that's causing the issue, there's not much that can be done about it.

I do wish that FIRST teams had the opportunity to get maintenance releases—I'd happily report bugs to PTC, in exchange for a more stable platform for FIRST teams to CAD on. (That always seemed like the fair thing to do with PTC's university donations; I've reported a couple that were acted on and resolved, with the fixes—as far as I know—implemented in later datecodes.)

That said, if you're still having problems, and have done your due diligence with troubleshooting on your own, there's a direct line to PTC for FIRST teams: contact either Mark Fischer, who uses the PTC_FRC account on ChiefDelphi, or Scott Morris, who goes by skotmorris on ChiefDelphi. They're both PTC staff and familiar with FIRST.

[vesh7]

Thanks Tristan. I will check again to confirm that the drivers we are using are certified by PTC. If it is a problem with Pro E itself, then there is little we can do about it. It's not a major problem, but just an inconvenience when the program crashes while working on a complex assembly. Thanks again.