Controlling Did You Know Balloon Notifications Revisited

Here is a quick update on this post from three years back. The InfoCenter area and Balloon Notifications button remain on the System tab of the Options dialog, but in the 2014 and 2015 releases, have moved up to the middle of the right column. I made a brief Screencast to show users at my firm how to avoid having to manually close the "Did You Know" messages in the 2014 release, and have decided to share that here, also:

Running Slowly?

Various suggestions have been made over the years in the Autodesk Discussion Groups and the AUGI Forums for dealing with AutoCAD^® Architecture running more slowly than normal. Here are a few things that I have found are helpful in that situation.

1. Bad Shortcuts: If you have a shortcut file in the AutoCAD Search Path (as defined on the Files tab of the Options dialog) that point to a non-existent folder or file, every time ACA need to check the search path (more often than you think), it will dutifully keep trying to resolve the bad shortcut until times out. One frequent culprit is the Add-A-Plotter Wizard in the Plotters folder. If you copied your plotters from a previous release and grabbed the Add-A-Plotter Wizard shortcut file as well, and then uninstalled the previous release (or otherwise moved or deleted the referenced program file), you will experience delays while ACA tries to find the missing file.
   
   
2. Bad File Locations: Check the entries for the Search Path and other file locations on the Files tab of the Options dialog, to make certain that all of the folders/files specified exist (in the location given). We had an office standard profile that had network path that referenced the hard drive on a local computer. (Don't ask me, I did not set it up.) So long as that computer was logged into the network, all was well. As soon as it was logged off, things slowed down, while waiting for the search for that file/path to time out. It took a while for me to realize that the speed issues I was having only happened after 5:00 pm, and it was only after I found the improper pathing that I understood why.