upgrading, do I really need to?

The really cool thing that I can add (I assume you're upgrading to 2004?) is the mtext, which can now handle tabs and other formatting. If you do allot of text, it's worth it. There are other enhancements. This should help your decision making:
In my personal opinion, it's worth it. Plus, every other upgrade is good to upgrade to.
Good luck.
Ken

You're too late. The deadline for upgrading to 2005 was yesterday. Now you'll have to pay full retail for your "upgrade." $3K is quite a bit to pay for the ability to put tabs in MText. ___

The time has come to stop using the word UPgrade! Lets just call it a "transfer" from one version to another.
A true story: When R13 was released, I went to a conference where several Autodesk developers presented the "greatest Autocad yet", and included a glossy brochure that "proved" how much better it was. Autodesk claimed to have scientific proof that R13 was a guarranteed way to make more money--they gave a real architectural design project to 2 companies-one using R12, the other the new R13, and timed how long it took to produce the final product. The brochure was incredibly detailed describing the projects (for example, it emphasized that the Xrefs provided to each architect by the land surveyors were located in different directories, and had to have their paths re-defined.) And surprise, surprise, the R13 company won the contest, made more profit and changed the planet earth forever.
But we all know that R13 was the biggest disaster in Autodesk's history.
Some upgrades were worth it--R12 vastly improved R10, and R14 vastly improved R12, because the world switched from Dos to Windows.
But today, Autocad does everything that you need in 2D, and the only people who need upgrades and "improvements" are the shareholders , not the customers.
Ask yourself, and ALL of your autocad-using clients--have you made more profit since upgrading? Have you completed more projects this year than last year, have you hired new personnel?
The only reason that it might be worthwhile to "up"grade is that you only pay about $500 instead of $3000. And you avoid compatibility problems with clients who forgot to save back to your version.
jojo wrote:

"Barry Shev" skrev i meddelandet news: snipped-for-privacy@netvision.net.il... Just curious, I have a R12 that runs in Windows not DOS. Is it different versions of R12? Tomas

Yes, there was a separate release of R12 specifically for Windows. ___

after a few versions go by, you can't save back to x version, & you can't upgrade for 500, you must pay the 3k & start over. This about the only valid reason I see.

My dealer purchased more than he needed and is still able to offer me the upgrade.
Thing is, in our office..one thing leads to another.
Upgrade to AutoCAD 2004 Upgrade all out windows 98 machines to pro so that they work with 2004 upgrade outlook so that it works with windows upgrade SBS small business server (exchange) to work with the new outlook that the client computers are using. At this time, it looks like we are going to take the upgrade and shelve it. j

on average , how much time do people in your office spend on downtime? like fighting printer drivers & incompatibility with clients, ect...

1%...really very little. Most of the folks I deal with outside of my firm use 2000 or lower. I have yet to have someone have a compatibility issue. We have the same old designjet 600 we have had for 100 years.
Our other BIG issue is that we use an "add on" program for layer control and such that will NOT be upgrading to 2004, it will just fade away. When that happens, we are left with AutoCAD "out of the box". Architectural desktop adds another $4000 per system pricetag. ouch.
j

actually i was more referring to the windows 98 issues.. I had that on my pc & home & it locked up all the time,.

Oh, AutoCAD 2000 seems to work just fine with windows 98 (at least in our office) j

You can still save back to R14, which tons of people are still using. With support ending for 2000 though, if you do much file exchange you will get increasing numbers of files in later versions, and you will spend increasing amounts of time asking partners to send you "old" versions.
Progress or not, there's no way around it. You don't necessarily have to follow every single burp from Autodesk, but by the time you're three versions behind it gets to be a pain in the behind!
G Faris