Two PCs on the Desk

IT guy warned me at 9am that I'd be getting the new Quad-Core box later in the morning. By 11am the new box was on the desk. It took another 20 minutes or so to get the new and old PCs running properly through the KVM switch. One hiccup was being stuck with a 100Mbps ethernet switch so I could have two boxes connected to the same drop cable. A serious fallback from the 1000Mbps connectivity I had with the old box.

My old PC is better than that for much of the staff, an Intel Core Duo 3GHz with 2GB RAM and a 128 MB video card running WinXP Pro. I ran a 256MB RAM disk to store temp and Xref files from AutoCAD which provided a seriously noticeable speed improvement when loading drawing files.

I've worked WinVista somewhat since getting an Acer notebook using WinVista Home Premium in June so I was familiar with several of the peculiarities such as the frequent popups wanting me to confirm an action about to occur. Interesting approach to so-called security, keep asking for confirmation at nearly every step of the way. No doubt there is a way to stop that process and similar ones.

It was the first time I'd seen AutoCAD 2008 (missed 2005, 2006 and 2007). A number of tweaks were needed. It seems that one cannot get all the preferred settings to be in place for a new user. Aggravating when one doesn't know where or how to set those preferences. The normal places to look have changed so a bit of hunting is required. Got through those for the most part with a good dose of help from our CAD Manager who has been using AutoCAD 2008 for a few months.

I expected the usefulness of a Quad-Core machine to be subjective. The improvement will be nearly nonexistent for most functions. The staff will see a great change simply because they're going from old to new PCs. When running CAD greater speed will be found in working with complex drawings and running batch routines such a plotting 136 drawing files to PLT format for a printer and creating 136 PDF files of the same sheets. (I think I just found a good testing scenario.)

Over the years, I've been fortunate to keep running fairly good machines (or at least upgrading them to where they held up under my demands.) What I eventually realized is that one will push a new machine until it "breaks" by blue-screening, locking up AutoCAD, freezing WinExplorer or some other result that forces a hard restart. I eventually began saying with a new machine I could go from zero to lockup faster that ever before. My old CADstation lasted three days. The older one before that lasted a week.

Just realized that plotting will be a bit of a trick. The two large format printers (Xerox 810) are not yet setup with 64-bit drivers and neither are a couple of other smaller ones. Two others are available so I'll see what happens.

It will be interesting to see how AcroPlot Pro runs on the new box. It's software that will process drawing files into PDF or DWF (AutoCAD's Drawing Web Format) in a fast way with plenty of options on the end result. It allows us to create PDF files from an entire set of drawings (10, 30, 70, 100, etc.) Select the drawings, check to make sure it's running well and head off for a bathroom break, refill the coffee mug and grab some office supplies. AcroPlot usually creates PDF files that are somewhat to substantially smaller than those created when using Adobe Acrobat Pro or another PDF printer program. It took a bit of convincing for our company to get AcroPlot Pro. I offered to pay the $900 for bunch of licenses provided I was paid $1 for each PDF created using the software. After much discussion the company agreed to pop for one license and the CAD Manager convinced them to 2.5 times as much for five licenses - a much better deal. I know this all sounds like a ad pitch but the stuff simply works very well.

An early start tomorrow to have fun.