Solid Know How™

Answer: Solid Business Central continues to be a reliable business solution throughout all the technological advancements the computer industry has seen. On some newer office computers though, the Solid Business Central program may freeze up from time to time, forcing the user to have to close the program improperly, and then reopen it to resume work. This problem has been linked to the fact that many newer office computers are equipped with multiple processors (Central Processing Units or ‘CPU’ for short).

The problem is a result of the Microsoft Windows ‘NTVDM.EXE’ program that Solid Business Central relies on to operate. When ‘NTVDM.EXE’ is running, it by default utilizes all CPUs available to it. The programs though can sometimes ‘get confused’, for lack of a better term, when changing between these CPUs, causing our Solid Business Central program to freeze. Thankfully Solid Innovation has created a solution for this issue, which can be applied by following the steps below.

NOTE: Users operating versions of Solid Business Central newer than version 10.01.02 should have this fix already automatically implemented through our program upgrades or installations.

The following instructions need to be performed on any office computer where this problem is occurring.

1. On this server or workstation computer, click on the following link to download the ‘StartAffinity.exe’ program:
   http://www.solid-innovation.com/downloads/StartAffinity.exe
   
   
2. When presented with the download options, select [Save] and when asked where on the computer you’d like to save the file to, save it into the folder that our software is installed into. This is often a folder called ‘Si’ and is often located at ‘C:\Si’ on most computers.
   
   
3. Once the ‘StartAffinity.exe’ program has been downloaded and saved into the software folder, right-click on the Solid Business Central icon on the desktop and select ‘Properties’.
   
   
4. This should open up a ‘Properties’ window. Select the ‘Shortcut’ tab from the top, and locate the ‘Target’ field. In this field, we need to add the ‘StartAffinity.exe’ program as part of the target line.

   If the ‘Target’ is written as: C:\Si\gm.bat
   Change it to: C:\Si\StartAffinity.exe gm.bat
   NOTE: if you do not have a gm.bat file you can download one by clicking here

5. Click on the [Apply] button to save this change, and resume operations.

   NOTE: If when [Apply] is selected a warning displays titled 'Problem with Shortcut', then it's most likely that the path has a space in it. In this situation, quotations need to be placed around the main location, and then have gm.bat included at the end, such as:
   "C:\Program Files\SI\StartAffinity.exe" gm.bat

6. When opening Solid Business Central now, if a warning displays for 'StartAffinity.exe' informing that 'The publisher could not be verified', please uncheck the 'Always ask before opening this file' checkbox, and use the [Run] button to continue.

If you require any further assistance with this setup, please call a Solid Innovation Customer Service Representative who’ll be happy to help.