I know this is a bit late to your postings, especially seeing I'd been following your posts, among others, with some interest. I'm not going to beat dead horses about the imperfections of CAD software and the like but reading your postings all over again made me feel like commenting on two things I've faced on SolidWorks since I started using a while back, things which continue to make me wonder why they are happening in the first place.

First – FORWARD compatibility. Personally, with all the talk about backward compatibility, I was somehow reminded to look the other way. In the direction of moving forward. Everytime a new version comes out, a bunch of my older models seems to get screwed – of late, moving from 07 to 08 is was crazy as perfectly assembled models were popping up with mate errors like leprosy. Even using the conversion wizard doesn't really help in many cases. A “new generation” problem? I don't think so. I've used SolidWorks since their versions came with “Plus” suffixes in their names and have, on and off, had that problem. And I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one out there facing this. And yes, as much as I'd love a new release as the next person, I am almost totally put off the thought of such things these days.

Second – mega-drawings. No one I've spoken to, VAR or SolidWorks, has been able to give me a decent answer to why, despite taking advantage of every enhancement up till 09 the VAR's have been able to throw at me, drawings of relatively small assemblies with 5-10 sheets can end up being 80+ MB in size, take aeons to open and require tonnes of RAM to work on despite having splurged on a workstation on steroids. Of course, someone of late had the cheek to suggest, in the name of environmental-friendliness and cost saving, that I should scrap drawings altogether and go paperless. To that, all I can say is “try telling the arc welder team to handle a laptop under the hot sun with a welding rod in one hand and tool in the other, buddy”.

I know this is a bit late to your postings, especially seeing I'd been following your posts, among others, with some interest. I'm not going to beat dead horses about the imperfections of CAD software and the like but reading your postings all over again made me feel like commenting on two things I've faced on SolidWorks since I started using a while back, things which continue to make me wonder why they are happening in the first place.

First – FORWARD compatibility. Personally, with all the talk about backward compatibility, I was somehow reminded to look the other way. In the direction of moving forward. Everytime a new version comes out, a bunch of my older models seems to get screwed – of late, moving from 07 to 08 is was crazy as perfectly assembled models were popping up with mate errors like leprosy. Even using the conversion wizard doesn't really help in many cases. A “new generation” problem? I don't think so. I've used SolidWorks since their versions came with “Plus” suffixes in their names and have, on and off, had that problem. And I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one out there facing this. And yes, as much as I'd love a new release as the next person, I am almost totally put off the thought of such things these days.

Second – mega-drawings. No one I've spoken to, VAR or SolidWorks, has been able to give me a decent answer to why, despite taking advantage of every enhancement up till 09 the VAR's have been able to throw at me, drawings of relatively small assemblies with 5-10 sheets can end up being 80+ MB in size, take aeons to open and require tonnes of RAM to work on despite having splurged on a workstation on steroids. Of course, someone of late had the cheek to suggest, in the name of environmental-friendliness and cost saving, that I should scrap drawings altogether and go paperless. To that, all I can say is “try telling the arc welder team to handle a laptop under the hot sun with a welding rod in one hand and tool in the other, buddy”.

Jeff

Some people just don't understand system requirements do they?