Sketchup slow and/or crashes

Jonefong

I use Sketchup primarily for building and landscape models. Since I almost always have 3d trees, plants and other high poly models with huge file sizes, once I get to a certain stage, my computer either locks up or I get a "bug splat" and have to reload the drawing. The drawing I'm currently working on is up to 285 MB. It's getting to the point that I'm getting "bug splats" and lock-ups on a very regular basis, and the program is moving very, very slow. While I understand a drawing of this size is probably rare for Sketchup, is there anything I can do to upgrade my computer, even if money were no object, to have a completely seamless, problem-free drawing experience - or - is Sketchup not capable of drawings of this size and complexity, regardless of the computing power? I'm willing to accept that if it's the truth, and I certainly don't want to spend any money on upgrading my computer if it's not going to do anything. Maybe it's time for a different program that can handle larger, more complex drawings?

The specs of my current computer are as follows:

Intel Core I7-4770 CPU @ 3.40 GHz
32 GB RAM
64-Bit
Windows 8.1
AMD Radeon R9 270 video card

Please help!!!

Jeff

TIG

Do you regularly use Model Info > Statistics > Purge Unused to keep your model as small as possible ?
Do you have some Styles set up in Scene-tabs which are 'simple' for general-modeling ? e.g. no line-extensions, depth-cues etc...
Do you have Scene-tabs set up for general-modeling with 'simple settings' - no textures, no shadows, no fog etc ?
Do you use Layers to control the visibility of groups/component-instances which are assigned to them ?
In that way you can navigate around less geometry while modeling parts.
You can always have 'presentation' scene-tabs which use more elaborate styles and other settings, for use in final output, rather than the day-to-day modeling...

Jonefong

These are all great suggestions, none of which I've tried. I'm a self-taught Sketchup user, so I don't know many of the tricks. I will give these a shot! In addition to this, is there any hardware upgrades I can do to help speed things up? Is a 285 MB drawing pushing the boundaries of what Sketchup is capable of? Thanks for your insight!