Some Headaches, Mostly Good

Okay, I totally botched that last post. Freaking newbie. Now for the patch which will be nothing like the original.

The CADstation is doing a pretty good job of dealing with AutoCAD 2008. I've not been able to yet lock up the program. Historically with each PC replacement, I've managed to lock up AutoCAD faster than previously experienced. I figured with a quad-core and 4GB of RAM I'd lock AutoCAD up on the first day within a few hours. It simple has not happened yet.

Since I have the original test machine I've got 4GB of RAM of which I'm runnning a 512MB RamDisk where I put the Temp and Xref files used by AutoCAD. Much faster than relying on the hard drive swapfile to hold those.

We've had trouble with PDF printing and plotting because we did not get updated licenses for WinVista. AutoCAD 2008 supposedly would do PDF plotting but the Add-A-Plotter Wizard was not present through the normal menu choices. A quick Internet search gave me the filename and I created the AutoCAD-PDF.pc3 file. Soon we'll get notice on our AcroPlot Pro WinVista update.

I also installed CutePDF to accommodate printing needs when emailing documents. New NitroPDF licenses were a bit of hiccup but it got resolved. Had to remove it from my PC and reinstall to eliminate the ad-banner inserted by the unregistered version.

There's a few quirks in AutoCAD 2008 as I've been using it. The method of zoom in/out is a bit unnerving as I'm accustomed to the quick-snap in/out movement. Now it's a smooth motion both ways. The automatic highlighting of entities is aggravating and I'm not sure if that can be turned off.

Odd Part: A 250GB external hard drive would not be recognized by the PC. Eventually, I found I had to keep the drive off and cold before connecting it. At that point, WinVista saw it properly and kept it active. Connecting a warm drive was complete USB failure.

Wildest Experience: Installed Google Earth. Checked out the Suez Canal and then typed in Meteor Crater and hit return. The zoom-out and move around the globe left me almost dizzy. Perhaps the 24" LCD screen at max resolution helped that effect.

I'll need to setup a sheet list routine for one of my projects, a 15-story office building. We're up to SI-042 which means there's been a lot of changes of what should be a fairly simple structure. The three-digit marker in that sequence does not bode well for the future.

After the CADstation Swap

The new CADstations were swapped out with their old counterparts starting on Wednesday. After the third one was setup and connected to the office network, the entire process came to a halt. Seems there was a problem with WinVista licenses registering properly. We're all good on licenses but something in the process just didn't fly right.

A call to Dell by our IT staff got the response of "you should have gotten a volume license" or something like that which would allow us to run a single WinVista license on the twenty machines. I found that odd though. If a fourth unique license wouldn't work, what's to say the volume license would keep plowing through. Nonetheless, the IT staff got things resolve and the process resumed on Friday.

Rolling Out the New CADstations

New CADstations will be rolling out this week, mostly Wednesday through Friday with roughly equivalent numbers each day. It's not too tough. Twenty new machines and re-imaging the old dual-core 3GHz machines. I convinced management to upgrade those machines to 4GB RAM but that has not yet happened.

Now to backtrack a bit. Ordering of the new PCs did not take place the day on which purchase was approved, that being Friday. It wasn't until Tuesday that the order was placed. When we ordered the prototype machine it took about two weeks for arrival. With the larger order, it only took two days before we received a portion of the order. Over the next week, portions of the order began to arrive with all of it in by the end of the week.

A beta PC was setup for a number of us to try out. Unfortunately it seems that some people were simply infatuated with the bells and whistles of Windows Vista than spending time testing out programs. A few programs needed to be added. Some we had to give up for now since the software companies have yet to issue versions for the new OS. All things considered it's going to be a bit interesting running WinVista.

We are also experiencing problems with a server becoming inaccessible as the network drives are unavailable. I don't think there's any correlation to the upgrade to WinVista but the problem is a bit strange. Perhaps it's a secondary issue somewhat related to the upgrade. We definitely have another glitch with one of enterprise software packages and the IT team has been in contact with the software company to get things resolved.

I'm supposed to get a new machine tomorrow but I did not yet seen one of the IT guys today. I did manage to offload several GB of data to an external hard drive. I run a number of other programs for my particular needs in design work and document manipulation. I'll slowly add those back onto the new PC as needed. Some I might need to upgrade to WinVista versions.

More later this week.