Counting to infinity

[fbhjr]

My CAD system at the new job has been very buggy. It crashes on average 3.4 times a day. This has confused the IT people and our CAD specialist as it is a new, very high end, computer with the newest software and operating system.
We’ve tried adjusting all sorts of settings, but nothing has made it better.
A few other folks in the company got new computers and theirs started doing the same thing.
A CAD trouble shooter from our reseller came in today to try and fix it.
“We’ll show you the other folks with problems, then take you to see Frank,” the CAD specialist said.
“Why?” the trouble shooter asked?
“You’ll see,” he said.
All morning I heard her going from cube to cube asking people what problems they were having. I heard all sorts of variations on the same thing.
“It crashes a lot.” “I lost lots of work.” “It seems buggy.”
Then, she was brought over to my cube.
“Here’s the list of every crash I’ve had in the last 6 weeks,” I said, calling up the spreadsheet. “You can see by these charts that it is most frequent in assemblies while opening, closing or saving parts. You can see by this other chart that it is most likely to happen between 9 and 9:30 in the morning. The attached charts show network traffic is at maximum then. The second most likely crash time is between 1 and 1:30 when people get back from lunch and the network traffic hits a second peak.
“I suspect what happens is these new 64 bit machines try to access the files on the network, get blocked due to a full network and times out much faster then the old 32 bit machines did.”
“Yeah, OK,” she said and sat down at my machine.
She could get my machine to crash doing just what I had said was the most likely to crash it.
Then, she turned on the CAD system data recorder to catch it doing it and it wouldn’t.
“I can’t understand why recording the system would keep it from crashing,” she said.
“It adds an additional process to the machine that is fairly intensive,” I said. “So, it is going to take it longer to count to infinity and get mad the file isn’t ready yet. It might be just slow enough that now the file is ready when it needs it.”
“That shouldn’t be what’s happening,” she said. She turned off the data recorder and it crashed again.
So, she took the data with her. Hopefully there is an answer other than record the data all the time.
We’ll see