My company is currently running Creo 2.0 M040, I am considering updating us to M070, but I have been seeing some negative things on the forum about the updates. I would like to get the thoughts of a few people that have installed M070. What can I expect with the update? Is it worth updating at this point?
James, I'd recommend getting a couple of the users to test it prior to pushing to production. There are two benefits for our company in the M070 build. One is a new config option where the preview window in the simplified rep UI only loads the images from objects in the WC10.1 workspace. (IE...it won't go to windchill and start automatically downloading objects into the users cache which can result in hangs) There is another benefit with the function of automatically locking objects in the workspace that was fixed. Sorry, I don't have much more detail on the lock issue. My perception from testing on large assemblies shows it to be more stable. On the downside, we are still not seeing performance improvements. I've got a couple cases and hoping to get to the bottom of it. I'm anticipating the answer to my case is that PTC recommends saving legacy version data to the new CP2 format. I'm also hoping for a strong focus on getting family tables to perform better. I've got data that shows assemblies will load twice as fast if the family table objects are converted to stand-alone objects.
Bill, we have noticed stability issues with the smart retrieval UI if the objects are forced to be streamed from the server. I have searched for but not been able to find the new config option for M070 that you mantioned. Do you remember what the option was or parts of it?
Here is the config setting...
dm_preview_searches_server no
This setting will really benefit companies using Creo Parametric connected to Windchill with large structures using simplfied reps. We have a bunch of users using the pre-wildfire 5 simplified rep UI just to avoid the preview window. I've seen some very cool functionality in the preview that users will like. One thing you will want to verify with this setting is the RAM usage when the preview image populates. I opened an assembly pushing the RAM to 10.5GB (7.5GB in task manager XTOP). Upon going to the simp rep UI, the preview increased the RAM to 19.5GB. My 12GB RAM computer didn't like it...I went to our 32GB RAM computer to see the 19.5GB. A case has been opened for PTC to resolve...the SPR was generated yesterday!
Thanks for the info guys. We are a small complany so I don't really have enough users to create a test group (5 users). I'm afraid doing something like that could affect our production, thats why I'm here asking for user experience.
Here is more detail on the locking functionality I was referring to...newer versions of Creo and Windchill have improved the functionality. If you have a Windchill/Parameric environment with family tables (where objects are notorious for being marked as modified), then this setting is something to look into.
I don't use Windchill, but just for basic stablity I have been switching back and forth between M050 and M070 and they are probably similar. I never ran M040. Out of M050, M060, and M070 50 felt the most stable but they all crashed at some point, but not repeatable. But saying that, I just loaded 70 on new computer because I didn't have repeatable show stopper crashes.
Well every version of Proe/Creo seems to have crashing issues. So I wouldn't say crashing issues is anything new, unless there are increasingly more crashing issues.
Reading the exploders the last month sure makes it sound like M070 is worse then most. M080 is out this month. We will be looking at that for compatibility for the upcoming PDMLink 10.2 update in Feb. timeframe. Maybe M090 if the pieces fall into place.