People:
I am an outside consultant for a firm that uses ACAD. My expertise is with servers, workstations, and networks, not with ACAD.
I've recently built and installed a new workstation using Windows Vista Business 64-bit for its OS, to accommodate 8 GB of RAM. My client continues to experience several crashes daily, usually while he rotates a fully-rendered 3D representation of a fairly complex drawing. [I will admit that as an outsider I don't know what a "complex" drawing is. The drawings are roughly thirty to one hundred times as complex as, say, a late-design steam locomotive, but not as complex as the Empire State Building.]
Two questions:
(1) When I set up AutoCAD 2009 on this machine, there was no specific indication that the 64-bit version was installed; the installation was quick and clean, but not very informative. For all I know, there is a 32-bit version running -- so the first question is: How can I be sure that the 64-bit version of ACAD 2009 is installed and running?
(2) When I check memory usage on the workstation using Task Manager, there is never an indication that more than 3.5 GB of the available RAM is being used, regardless of the number and size of drawings that are opened simultaneously. Is this an indication that only the 32-bit version of ACAD 2009 is being used? Or is there some setting that must be enabled to permit ACAD to use all available RAM?
Thanks in advance for your help.