Slow open/save in 2004

[cadmaster]

I have been working on a WinXP machine running AutoCAD 2004 and have noticed a sudden increase in the time to open and save some drawings - typically 30secs for a 200KB file! I have also noticed that there is network and internet activity going on at the same time - if I close down the internet connection the process drops to 5-10 secs.
This only occurs on drawings made after a certain date - I do not think it could be a virus as the machine has AV and firewall installed.
I have tried progressively deleting entities from a drawing to find the culprit with no success - I have a drawing with no entities at all, no blocks, no layers, no text- or dim- styles other than the defaults and it still takes over half a minute to load! Status also reports 238 objects in the drawing!
Does anyone know what is going on?

[windowsxp5]

Check “support files search path “ is that from network?..ie,, plot style table..printers.. If that’s from net work change back to c:…..THEN TRY :shock:

[architech]

Following the same path as "win..XP" ....
Are you using the "Project directory" and the "Working Dicrectory" to define your search path?

If so try, removing all the folders from the Project directory and place them in the working directory. [In the appropriate order ... of course ..."hiearchy".]

HTH
:)

[dontsailbackwards]

Found our DWGs were taking a month of sundays to load. type "image" and have a look to see if there's a stack of raster images attached to the drawing. We had lots, none of which actually appeared in the drawing and "purge" doesn't address this. Ours were on now-long-gone network drives so they slowed stuff down a lot in fruitless searches.

In the image manager, in the full version only (not LT, darnit) there is a "detatch" option which gets rid of the reference to the image from the drawing.

If you open a "dxf" file (or even a dwg file) in a tet editor you will see there references to these files (and the autocad website, at times).

Uuum, if you don't have access to the full version, er, good luck ?

:)
Ewen

[cadmaster]

Thanks to all who replied - 'dontsailbackwards' had the answer - the drawings had references to deleted images, not just those used in the drawing but also, because I use SaveAs to create the next drawing in a series, there were all the references to the images used in all the preceding drawings as well!

[rimidalv]

I don't know about the slow save but I do know that 2004 has a much bigger acad.pat file and if you use the older release 15 pat file that helps a little. Rename the release 16 pat file to something (acadpat.16 or something) and copy the release 15 pat file to the support folder and see if that helps. It has helped for me. :?: