Problems with running SU on Unibody MacBook Pro

Marconiusrex

Hello - I have a late 2008 15" Unibody MacBook Pro with a 2.53GHz Core2Duo processor, 4GB of RAM and 250GB hard drive. Also the Nvidia 9400 and 9600 GPU. Running Snow Leopard (10.6.3)

I occasionally have problems doing certain things in Sketch UP 7 ( not pro). On some files that are usually between 15 and 40 MB I get "spinning beach balls" (like an hour glass on the Windows machine) when I open the files and save the files and when I export to something like a JPEG. There have been some occasions where I have to "force quit" to get out of the program.

Any other MacBook users out there have any similar issues? It seems like my machine should be plenty fast to run SU without these slow ups/freezes. It's not like I'm running 3D studio max or something like that.

Any help or direction would be appreciated.

Thanks

Mark

Slimdog

Those are fairly big files for sketchup. I have a newer and faster mac book than yours and I some times have issues like you are having.

pbacot

Yes, I find this problem on a MacBook Pro and I have had big files. But they might only be 30 MB or so. Try purging layers, components, etc. Do you import .dwg files? I get rid of .dwg imported objects and layers after I've used them for set-up (you can always re-import). I end up with tons of components in these imports. So I eventually had a buggy 28MB file go down to 4 MB without loss to the model I am actually working on. I don't know if just purging is all that happened to drop the file size, perhaps the file repaired itself some other way, but the files don't need to be that big generally.

Edson

@slimdog said:

Those are fairly big files for sketchup. I have a newer and faster mac book than yours and I some times have issues like you are having.

I do not agree. size has little to do with it; what counts is the number of polygons. after 7.1 was released I was able to work on files 3 times as big as the ones that brought sketchup to a crawl before. and it is normal for me to work on files close to 80MB and more.

are you organizing your file well with layers and scenes? this is really important, as any veteran user will tell you.

Slimdog

Yes I agree with you Edson. Those are some helpful hints that I though about giving but he only stated problems with opening and closing files mainly.