CAD software for D&T - what do you have?

[cheredenine]

Our D&T head of department has been offered 30 licenses for Solidworks. The problem is the PCs in his class room are a little old and will need replacing; I'm trying to weigh up whether this is worth it considering we as a school haven't used Solidworks and don't know if its suitable.

 

Do any of you have Solidworks in your schools? If not, what do you use instead? Any opinions on quality or usability?

 

 

Also, for those who do have it, have you tried it on PCs of a lower specification than that recommended? The Solidworks website suggests all manner of high-end nVidia and ATi graphics cards as being suitable, but including this would drive the replacement cost of the aforementioned D&T PCs up markedly...

 

Cheers!

[EduTech]

We use Pro Desktop for our CAD lesson's.. was running on P4 HT 3.0Ghz 1 Gig Ram at one point.

 

Running Version 8 now.

 

James.

[Geoff]

Pro Desktop here too.

[rush_tech]

Pro desktop here too:)

[Sylv3r]

We use Solidworks here, but I have never been able to package it up for rollout to our workstations even folling the step by step instructions. So we have had to manually install it on our worksations. The licence server correctly limits the number of users to 10 however.

[actech]

We use the Autodesk 2008 Suite (Cad, Inventor & Revit).

 

I know that most of the uni's and TAFE's around here still use it as do a lot of industries, which is why we went with it

[e_g_r]

We use Solidworks here, but I have never been able to package it up for rollout to our workstations even folling the step by step instructions. So we have had to manually install it on our worksations. The licence server correctly limits the number of users to 10 however.

 

Am haveing the same problem, follow the instructions and then nothing happens.

[kmount]

PD8 here too.

[rh91uk]

We use ProDesktop - pretty nice & simple piece of software, but the diadvantage of having to log in as "administrator" to get all features fully working first time.

[kmount]

We didn't need to do that.

[EduTech]

We never had to do it either

[Andrew_C]

Turbocad and Google Sketch-Up.

[john]

We never had to do it either

 

We didn't need to do that.

 

You must be lucky, unless an Administrator extrudes something before a student it will crash. Once done once by an Admin its fine though

[markwilliamson2001]

Depends on what you mean by "CAD", this could be paint (a design program used on a computer - computer aided design! LOL).

 

However, we use PD8 at our place, and had the problem of extruding when deploying the MSI, so included it as a manual install on workstations, with the extrusion trick completed.

 

We also have Techsoft 2D Design V2 which is excellent and comes with its own MSI and excellent deploy instructions. I think i just used a startup script for the license file. The only issue with it was that I had to install certain drivers for printers cutters and engravers seperately (but the older version natively supported them).

 

Mark

[rh91uk]

You must be lucky, unless an Administrator extrudes something before a student it will crash. Once done once by an Admin its fine though

 

Yep, thats the experience I had!

[tjb]

We use the Autodesk 2008 Suite (Cad, Inventor & Revit) here too. We have Solid Edge too but nobody uses it so I took it off the image...

[User3204]

We use Pro D (ver 8) at school, I think you get a site license if one (or more) of your teachers goes on a training course, I know we don't pay for it.

 

One of the DT teachers has recently gone on a Pro Engineer course, and he says this is the same deal, so now they're asking if I can install this as well (or instead, not sure), but I haven't gotten the installers yet.

One of the Art teachers here, is also hassling to get SolidWorks license, but as we've no ICT Manager at the moment, we've been able to sideline this.

 

I had looked at Autodesk, but the install was just too stupid - although this was a few years ago.