Minimum PC to run Preform 1.5

My older PCs (Win XP) no longer run Preform (after version 1.3). I’m open to upgrading  my shop computer to something with an up-to-date graphics card. Any light that can be shed on this would be appreciated. If users (or Formlabs ) have experience running Preform v1.5 on  PCs that don’t cost a whole pile of money, I’d love to hear about it. Anyone running a Core II Duo and Win 7? This won’t be my workstation, just a terminal for processing Preform files.

We’ve updated the minimal specifications to be a little more detailed – you do need to be running PreForm with Windows XP SP3 (at least). Some older video cards can also cause problems.

An inexpensive, modern PC should be suitable for loading a file – though perhaps not ideal for editing, calculating supports, and all the rest of the heavy lifting that PreForm does.

I’ve got SP3 running on multiple PCs, so It looks like the “older video card” issue is causing trouble. It would be great to gain some insight from other users and/or the various computers at Formlabs. If I get an old Core 2 Duo machine, will that run reasonably well?

You can take a look at more complete specs here, but you need a card that at least support OpenGL 2.1. Some online sleuthing may show whether yours does or does not.

I’ve got an Nvidia Quadro 1600M video card in my laptop running XP sp3. The video card is supposed to run Opengl 2.1 (see here: http://www.nvidia.com/object/IO_42274.html). The computer runs SolidWorks just fine up to release 12, which dropped XP, so it’s done it’s share of heavy lifting. I hope the new graphics routines in versions 1.4 and 1.5 do something that justifies the expense of new computers.