Extremely Slow Layout Switching in AutoCAD
Yesterday I spent a little over 2 hours trying to fix an AutoCAD setup for an architect. Of 5 computers in the office one was opening files and switching layouts with a very long delay - about 2-3 minutes before you could return to work. Sure, the files were big and had many objects but the workstation was an HP Pentium 4 3.2 GHz with 512 MB of RAM…
The problem was that each time AutoCAD regenerated the whole project it kept working and working… The most time was spent on formatting text so I started poking around in AutoCAD options and then started looking at Windows’ display settings. It was obvious that the whole delay was caused when redrawing the layers.
Well, we finally found the solution. There was nothing else to change in AutoCAD and changing the system Display settings did not affect the speed at all. So I turned off font smoothing in Display | Appearance | Effects and all of a sudden AutoCAD started working like it was supposed too. All 3.2 GHz to your command 
I often say this, and it’s so far been true: the simplest solutions are always the hardest to find. I’m an administrator and programmer with years of experience and yet there are problems like this one that waste a lot of my time…
If you ever have this problem I hope Google points you here
AutoCAD 2006 and AutoCAD LT 2006 Bible
Tags: appearance, architect, autocad lt 2006, bible, google, hp, hp pentium, layouts, pentium, programmer, simplest solutions, workstation
Holy Cow, i cant believe it. ive been searching for the slow text formatting fix everywhere. searched up and down even on autodesk website and nothing popped up. ive been dealing with this problem for hmm id say at least 5 years and now this is all it was. thank you so much, and i guarantee that this would be appreciated by many other autocad users if they only knew. thanks again
Mike L.
Searching for the fix wasn’t pleasant when I tried, either. It seems that other people don’t have this problem or maybe they don’t know about it
Thanks for the tips… and yes google did send me here… searched for “AUTOCAD SLOW TEXT FORMATTING”.
It take me a few minutes to figure out that the Display | Appearance | Effects that you stated was the computer setting and not an Autocad setting… augh.
Thanks!