Making AutoCAD Faster

Computer Changes
Go to Control Panel > System > Advance System Settings > Performace > Settings > Visual Effects. If you haven't changed these before it's likely set to "Let Windows choose what's best for my computer". That probably means everything is selected in the options list. Instead select "Adjust for best performance". That will unselect everything in the options list. Before you click the OK button be aware they computer will become non-responsive for a while as it reconfigures the display changes. After the screen flashes one or more times, the resulting view is very similar to that of Window 2000 Pro. Talk about a rollback. In essence all those special visual effects are eliminated with the goal of making the video display process as fast as possible.

What is the real result after such a change? The AutoCAD program loads noticeably faster. Drawings visibly load faster and manipulating drawings is quicker. I'm going to give this route a try for a couple weeks to see how it works out for me. After a couple days it still feels odd to look at the screen.


Drawing File Cleanup
Here are some links that I found through another site of which I unfortunately cannot recall the name at this time.

http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/ps/item?siteID=123112&id=11817088&linkID=9240617
Autodesk link regarding drawing files with unreferenced registered applications and their effect on performance.

http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/ps/dl/item?siteID=123112&id=11807875&linkID=9240618
Stand-alone program, Regapp ID Cleanup Utility, that removes excess unreferenced registered applications from drawings.

http://images.autodesk.com/adsk/files/cleanupregapp.html
Information page on the use of the Regapp ID Cleanup Utility program.

I've tried this on drawing files that were 1100-1400KB in size and the utility reduced the sizes to 1/2 or 1/3 of the original size after removing the applications from the drawings. Files loaded faster also after running this program. I did seem to think that running the -purge command manually through the command line prompt in AutoCAD was better at reducing file size that the utility but the utility is more friendly and faster.