Probably hopeless, but I think I lost my autosave file, and many hours of work :(

Yeah, it’s no big deal, I already did the work over anyway. :wink:

I find I’m more mentally entrained for the purpose at the keyboard after data loss ‘disasters’ that I have survived with far less collateral damage than it at first seems…

If there’s still any issue with keyboard layout, AHK scripts could be the answer. You could perhaps even write one that ensures a save operation is performed along with a certain action in the session, like ‘Zoom Extents’, if you’re in the habit of using it…, it’s a third party workaround but it’s not what you’d call intrusive.
If this doesn’t reassure you, and this would obviously be best with a 21:9 ultrawide monitor or secondary ‘parking monitor’, you could have the file manager window with the file location open in it, on screen alongside the Sketchup window and actually see it update with the system clock to verify it has indeed saved…

1 Like

Syncbackfree is a brilliant backup software package that I use for backing up my NAS server an PC offline… it is very flexible and you could ask it to specifically backup SU files at whatever interval to wherever you think is appropriate… highly recommended and free / donation ware.

PS, set my autosave to 20 minutes but backup manually at milestones or demanding plugin runs

2 Likes

Oh man you did it now… lol…
I have a gigantic LG monitor (bought six months ago) and a Plugable 3.0 docking station. I have completely given up and am now back to sitting with my laptop on my lap, using it while my lovely monitor gathers dust.
I cannot even start Sketchup while connected to the docking station, because I get an error saying something about insufficient graphics resources or something to that effect - I must start it on my laptop, then plug into the docking station.
Then, performance is just atrocious. Click. Wait. Click. Wait some more. Eventually, nearly all of my regular clicks began to somehow be received by the system as double clicks, it was absolutely unbearable.
The performance on my laptop alone is actually not bad at all. I have updated all drivers on my docking station, wireless mouse, etc., and I made sure that absolutely NOTHING is running except essential Windows services and Sketchup.

Any ideas for troubleshooting?

Have you tried connecting the monitor directly with hdmi or display adapter?

No, I don’t have a hdmi port on my laptop, and I didn’t know I could just use an adapter. I’ll look into that, can’t be very much, right?

Issues like these are often related with incompatible hubs

I’ve had something similar when selecting, it takes an age to highlight - you could double click areas around a 24 section circle, go make a drink, come back and deselect the plane areas, enjoy drink while reading a synopsis for something, then eventually get back to the task in hand and hides the lines with a simple Alt+E,H…
The problem is of course that you may not have properly selected or deselected everything as required yet couldn’t see this in real-time, so it would all have to be done again. I haven’t nailed down exactly what causes this, but it isn’t happening all the time, nor is it happening using other ways of selecting like the r/click context menu options. When it is happening, the clicks are buffering - so literally anything after three blind mice is out on a limb…
What I do know is that this system will not run SU2018 due to graphics requirements and after 2017 support is reaching it’s end I will be looking into another system for the required upgrade…
Thankfully I have something that may do the job, yet to check it out, - just that it’s not a portable solution.

Always worth tinkering with a monitor, the connection and drivers should be industry standard and you’d expect no issues if it all fits together and you see the image expected to be there - but I once got something I expected to use from USB power that with other hardware offered up a portable scanning solution I could take anywhere with the hope of battery power to a raspberry pi getting a few hours of remote site work done, but the hardware was only really configured to use alongside an existing monitor, or what I expected was heretofore inconceived; there were lots of support forums and suggestions with drivers, but it was not solved in any attempt I made, it only ever attained a green screen in that configuration and I Had no other use for it so it got sent back - depreciation is fiendish, I know people still holding out for $tens more than their second hand stuff is worth.

If I have any advice on system performance that could be useful, it is to create an ideal session - all the required settings and none of the extraneous processes - and then to boot into that session afresh, assured that it is how Sketchup runs best and with only running Sketchup in mind.

OpenGL may deserve a look in too…

Yeah, I’ve pretty much come to accept that if I want to use SU, I must shut down every other thing, and that is that. I’m hesitant to even load extensions. I only have two at the moment, and I have given up on using my big monitor altogether. :frowning:

It was after I typed that last post that I went online to see if there’s a SU for Linux systems - instead what I found that seemed to work fine was SU in a web page, I guess my performance issues are over…, the pc I have Linux installed on was going to be a dual boot with Windows on a separate partition, things like SU with only Windows capacity from among the systems I run being the reason to have both -

  • Of late, increased compatibility, binary layers, virtual machines, and things like that are really improving matters - the real blessing however, is that I was given the pc, albeit without RAM & processor; I only spent around £70 on those pushing it to top spec. though. Then my cousin fished out a graphics card and that’s all I had to fit besides install an operating system. It’s not the convenience of a laptop - but a finished file I’m only going to open and rotate will not pose the aforementioned problems - and if that still snarls things up, I can always export an animation of it being rotated for presentation purposes…

So maybe try grab a bargain, a graphics card doing what the RAM is forced to in the absence of it’s onboard memory was likely the best upgrade for me…
…I cannot however actually imagine how a monitor on the end of the HDMI, or any cable would cause a performance issue*, usually you expect it to work optimally out of the box with only brightness/contrast/V&H shift/sound EQ to adjust - although I did end up looking at SSD drives for that pc with SATA II port connectivity in mind because of the motherboard specs - if I do get one however, it will be SATA III and simply not function in its upper performance capability…;
*Here, in search results for HDMI 1.0, other types are listed and ‘4K’ is mentioned…, could this be connected with the issue you describe, a connecting cable rather than the computer or the monitor?

It’s possible, I guess… I do know that all HDMI cables are not the same, the vary in price by an amazing amount. That would be one thing to keep in mind. There are some better ones laying around here somewhere, I could try one out. :slight_smile:
I was also going to try a regular usb mouse, as I was using a bluetooth trackball mouse, and I’ve been wondering if that could be the point of failure as well. Now I know I’ve seen a couple of those around here somewhere too!

Obviously, beware of paying more for a cable - this has been a thing, certainly in the UK, where there’s no obligation to say, ‘it performs the same’, or, ‘there’s no noticeable difference in performance’ and stores have been convincing consumers to spend ridiculous amounts of money. A different hardware/firmware version is something to be aware of, but charging more for gold plated jacks isn’t really justified in a price hike that is pure extortion…,

Back to my SATA II/III issue, it is backwards compatibility that will ensure I can plug a SSD listed as SATAIII into a motherboard port specified as SATAII - two sites I have checked for compatible drive makes and models vary in their listings, one has only three drives certified, the other has a list so long across 28 manufacturers I haven’t bothered to count it and may reasonably assume any SATAIII SSD should work.

So, I recommend spending only what an unbranded cable is worth to find out what you might need, then if it works, use it until the vital need for a replacement, by which time it will not owe you anything…

Oh my goodness, I know… I went to Best Buy with my mom - who is 80 years old, and extremely bright for her age, but not necessarily tech savvy - specifically because she needed a HDMI cable for the Roku I bought her. I was astonished at how they have the displays set up. The pathway just sort of, effortlessly directs your feet right to this brightly lit, nicely organized rack of assorted cables, and the clerk picked up the HDMI package and handed it to me with a big smile and said, “Here you go!” It was like, $70. I said, Oh, no, no, no. This is not necessary, where are your, like, under $10 HDMI cables? I know you have them, I saw them online. Then he leads us over to this wire bin attached to the back of some display at the edge… my poor mom would never have found it on her own. Also, she probably would have let them talk her into the idea that she needs the pricier one because, reasons. Yeah, they don’t get me with that bs. :wink:

I feel like saying, “My work here is done :)”

Yeah, it really just goes back to me saying have a tinker until there’s nothing you can comfortably adjust or without voiding the warranty - not that that would even be ideal; something more ‘standardised’ would not need the in depth knowledge and extensive configuration and something as sufficiently advanced as a new monitor should work with the latest operating system to offer up a five second per mode cycle setting and all you have to do is press a button to stop it on the one you want…, & when it comes to rendering something on screen as you use a program and you can’t reasonably perch there waiting on the settings button, it’s still not a stretch of the imagination that the computer has some benchmarking capability that lets it analyse the screen output ot the data rate on the cable, adjusting according to feedback - So all ths makes me feel like none of the required progress has been made at a crucial point and then no matter what other advances are made in all the technology combined there, the bottleneck occuring brings it back to going as slow as the weakest link…

For that reason i conceived of ‘AwesMauler Technology [Corporation]’ - where the ever decreasing size of technology still always becoming more powerful is ever reliant on that form factor reduction being able to accommodate the users’ demands in all aspects - processing, storage, battery life, bandwidth, data rate, security, resolution, price, etc, etc. It all needs to be ‘delimited’, even if that could only mean terminal access to server-side technology.
It would be great to learn one day that we could mentally create all that we use a computer for, especially in CAD modelling, a mere effortless feat in vivid imagination, even better to leave it on in ‘dreamweaver mode’ while sleeping - but if all that had made it possible was flawed due to a cable in earlier physical incarnations not being the right spec for data transfer - one foresees potentially fatal aneurysms and associated businesses crashing out of the stock exchange…