black screen - HELP

[Squirrelrock]

Hey all,

I just started up Inventor and tried to open a part, but the part backgroud is black and I cannot figure out how to change it so that I can see to draw.

Any help/suggestions would be appriceated.

Squirrel

<edit>
and yes, I did search the CAD/Inventor forum for this. sorry if I/it missed anything
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[team222badbrad]

Not sure if this is the answer to your problem, but do this.

Click on Tools
Then Application Options
Then click the Colors tab
Then choose the color scheme you want.
Finally click apply and ok

[jdiwnab]

I watched him try stuff, and I think he did that. He even tried to put a bitmap in the background just to see if things would change, but nothing seemed to change it.

[team222badbrad]

Your best bet would then probably be to reinstall it or you may need to restart your computer if you have not allready tried that.

Also did you check to see if there are any updates for the version of Inventor you are using?

[jdiwnab]

Is it possible that the computer is too old? The computer is 200MHz and doesn't do much. We are trying to replace it, but it has worked before. It has Inventor 5. Could settings change (that you can't change yourself) that would prevent normal operation?

[sanddrag]

Originally Posted by jdiwnab

Is it possible that the computer is too old? The computer is 200MHz

YES! I'd say that does not even meet the minumum requirements for Inventor 5. Are you getting the problem with 5 or 8? Anyway, you need at least a Pentium III. Once you have the processor, you need a good video card and lots of RAM. Inventor is a very resource intensive program. You should check this thread. http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...ad.php?t=29945

[jdiwnab]

Originally Posted by sanddrag

YES! I'd say that does not even meet the minumum requirements for Inventor 5. Are you getting the problem with 5 or 8? Anyway, you need at least a Pentium III. Once you have the processor, you need a good video card and lots of RAM. Inventor is a very resource intensive program. You should check this thread. http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...ad.php?t=29945

We are trying to get much better computers. I was using Inventor 8 on my personal computer because our computers are horable. The school's computers have Inventor 5. They had been working fine, And I think that all the other similar computers still work.

<rant> The school system is too cheep to supply "The Center of Engineering" with decent computers. There might be enough money in our center budget to build 2-3 new computers. Not enough to replace about 42 that we have. 20 minuite start-ups are bad</rant>

[Al Skierkiewicz]

In Autocad, a black background for the drawing area is a choice in the "options" pulldown under "tools" on the menu line. Black is the default and you will go back to using it as it is so much easier on your eyes. The one drawback is drawing a black colored object on the black background. Autocad fixes this, when you draw with color 7. This is the default color that displays as white but prints as black. I have not used the modern Inventor but I am guessing it steals a lot from Autocad.

[jdiwnab]

The regular background in Inventor is light blue. When you start a "part" you must first "sketch" some "feature" of it then make it 3d using different methods (That Inventor in a very small nutshell ). The default lines are green (for non-constrained lines) and black (for constrained lines). Neither are showing up and you can't see the grid that is usually there in sketch mode

<Edit 3/10/05 10:00 est>
Well, what ever it was fixed itself without any encouraging beyond what we tried and that didn't work. We now have 7 of 12 200-333MHz computers running Inventor 5. 2 computers lack Inventor (but were suppost to have it) and the other 3 lack mice/keyboards. They don't run great, but enough for simple things like teaching how to do some inventor stuff.
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