CAD recommendations please

I have used AutoSketch for many years now & find that it does everything that I need it to do.

Regards, Tony

Freebies:-

John Stevenson Nottingham, England.

Visit the new Model Engineering adverts page at:-

"Cliff Coggin" said

I would check eBay for a copy of CorelDRAW. Any version from 5 upward is very capable and eminently flexible for the most complex 2D CAD and is not constrained by the need to emulate a drawing board like any program that has 'CAD' in its title.

JG

Thanks for the tip J, but perhaps I'll avoid Ebay. I am perfectly happy with emulation of drawing boards as I learnt many years ago to do it the old fashioned way with pencil, paper, board, and T-square. In fact I can probably draw faster this way than I can using my present computer application, hence the desire to change.

Thanks also to Tony and John S. I'll investigate their recommendations later today.

Cliff.

"Cliff Coggin" said

Perhaps I didn't make myself as clear as I might have done :)

One of the reasons I use CorelDRAW is because I did try TurboCAD and AutoCAD and a variety of other 'CAD' and all of them made me far less productive than Pencil and Paper.

Currently on eBay there is Version 7 at 50p with 1 bid and 3 days to go, V 12 at £20 with no bids and 5 hours to go, V5 at £7.99 Buy-It-Now and V9 at £13.99 B-I-N

JG

You should also consider an older version, V6-V8 say, of TurboCad. Its a very powerful 2D CAD program and the older versions are very cheap. They're also very capable 3D programs, but you don't have to work in 3D if you don't want to..

Can you comment on which are the 'good' recent versions? I'm still using V5, though not for CAD, it used to be that generally the odd numbered versions (3, 5, 7) seemed to be much better, more stable etc than the even numbers.

Cheers Tim Dutton Dry-Dock Traditional & Modern canal craft repairs Vintage diesel engine service

Tim Leech said

I've used every version from 0.9 up to 11 and although I have also heard stories about 'odd' versions being more stable the only one that I recall being duff was 4 (from whence I suspect the urban myth came). V4 had a very quick 'correction' and even that was questionable and V5 came along within half the normal time between upgrades.

If I were looking to buy now (from eBay) I would get the V9 B.I.N. - at £14 it is silly. I've just checked again and the V12 has 1 bid and 1h

JG

Go to a Linux distro. and use Qcad.

Interesting bunch of responses!

The correct answer is probably very dependent on what you want to draw, be it mechanical/electrical or other regime.

We have used Autocad 11 since the early 1990's, and while it has a very steep learning curve, I had no problem transferring from pen and paper to screen at all.

One problem you will find, and this relates to all drawing or publishing packages, once you are into a particular brand of software, it is very hard to change to something else.

Likewise with DOS and Windows packages, I find it much better and quicker to use the DOS versions than the Windows equivalents.

The last mentioned is very much a personal taste thing as much as anything, but we have now set up a purely DOS-based machine that only runs the two DOS packages we use. Fortunately they both use the same graphics card (Orchid ProDesignerII)

Peter (In sunny California this week...)

I used to use a program called IntelliCAD which is really a clone of AutoCAD also uses same file formats. IntelliCAD 2000 I'm sure was released as a free application for private users and the earlier versions were issued free on the cover disc of a few of the computer magazines. I use a full version of AutoCAD now but for 2D work IntelliCAD is just as good and as easy to use. You may find some more info at

Liam

I use (and love) IntelliCAD 2001 Lite, which came off a magazine cover disk. If you're interested, I can find out which magazine and what date. While you are tracking down an original disk on eBay (or wherever), I could let you borrow my backup disk....

As Liam says, IntelliCAD is an AutoCAD clone: it reads and saves DWG files. One of its best features is that it is easy to print stuff out: I use AutoCAD LT occasionally at work and its 'plot' command is hard work. IC does have some quirks, and crashes randomly (but fortunately very infrequently) but they can be worked around, and as long as you save your work at regular intervals, there is no problem.

IntelliCad is free on the cover disk of PCPlus May 2005 Issue 229.

Might be just the DVD issue cannot remember.

The program runs to January 2006 and is free to use for non-commercial use.

Lionel

Hi Cliff try this it looks ok but it may only work with the site