+1 on what juiceclone said.
SolidWorks can be a real resource hog. You can adjust performance to put less of a drain on your system resources but an anemic computer will slow down the performance, particularly when rendering large and complex parts and assemblies. Minimally, the video card must be open GL capable. Ideally, you will have 1 GB of video ram or more.
Good gaming computers have different requirements than drafting work stations, particularly in the video area. A high end graphics card for a CAD workstation can run into the thousands of dollars. One recommendation would be to install a solid state drive. It greatly speeds up disk read/writes which will occur when ram gets overloaded. The company that I last worked for had a rule that we not select laptops if we were using SolidWorks because our laptops were encrypted for security purposes and the encryption process would slow down performance. I elected to go with a laptop but chose an laptop with a solid state drive and had no problems with slowdowns.
Previously, I had used a Dell Precision 90 which had always served me well.
For my home desktop, chose an HPE 410 specifically for CAD performance. I experienced slowdowns with my 6 GB ram at times until I upgraded to to 12GB. (However, I tend to have multiple apps open at once.) I use Windows 7 Ultimate currently but have had no problem with XP in the past.
SprutCAM 7 would black out the screen unexpectedly until I went to a lower performance setting for the rendering. When running simulations, my computer will issue unusually high processor usage warnings.
One consideration for CAD is to get the largest practical screen. zooming in and out to observe fine detail can be a real pain. This is particularly true for laptops. I never went with smaller than a 17" screen. Carrying it on a plane was an issue but it gave adequate performance. For a desktop, I use a 24" screen and wish it was bigger.
Bob
