getting bug eyed

Nothing New: I am going to take the low road and wait for SP4-5 before upgrading my installation. If I pay the subscription fee, that means they get my subscription money 6 months before I can upgrade, and I either accept that or let my subscription lapse and decide much later to reinstate or not.
For a person or company doing intensive work, it has to be a more difficult decision on when to upgrade, as they have to look out for problems with their workflow that could cost them more dollars to fudge around solutions, than the benefits of the upgrade. "You pays your money and takes your chances."
Given my needs I suspect I will pay the subscription fee, but I will listen to the early adopters before I decide to write that $2k check or not.
Bo
neil wrote: ...

It's certainly a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" scenario. I personally chose NOT to send them my money almost 2 years ago, and I can't say I've regretted the decision although it has led to inconvenience from time to time. I'm still using 2005 and the bugginess is relatively low for what I do, which is mostly machine design -- although I've done a pretty fair amount of quite complex geometry using surfacing for product design (injection molding). I might contemplate re-upping my subscription sometime in the relatively near future, but only if my VAR can get me 2006 CDs (even if 2007 has come out by the time of my re-subscribing). If I can only get 2007 CDs then I'll wait even longer until 2007 is relatively bug-free ... if it ever gets there.
Regardless, I maintain that SolidWorks Corp is NOT giving sufficient value for the cost of subscription, and hasn't been giving sufficient value since before the release of SW2000. Especially with their re-packaging of the product (eliminating SolidWorks Office simple in favor of SolidWorks Office Professional) I absolutely RESENT paying them anything at all.
'Sporky'

Neil, Here is an interesting article from Scienticic American "Dependable Software by Design". design checking with a tool called ALLOY Page 2 kind of caught my eye with phrases shown quoted below, then funnily enough Solidworks crossed my mind.
"What is worse, bugs "fixed" during the testing process often exacerbate design problems. As programmers debug the code and insert new features, the software invariably grows barnacles of complexity, creating more opportunities for errors and inefficient operation........." "Similarly, bad software tends to get more and more complicated and less and less reliable, however much time and money are poured into improving it. It is well known that serious problems with software systems rarely arise from programming errors; almost all grave difficulties can be traced back to conceptual mistakes made before programming even started...."
I am thinking of going the other way and bailing out of Subscription. 2006 in my view is a bit of a non event and so far I am 'underwhelmed' by 2007

There were three reasons I jumped from Anvil Surfacing to SW in 1996:
1. It was fast 2. File sizes were small 3. It was robust. Very solid and few bugs.
Ten years later.
1. I couldn't possibily say it is fast running on the 166 Pentium I had ten years ago with 300 Mb RAM. I can't even say it is fast on the AMD64 FX53 I have today. 2. File sizes are huge 3. I spent all day Thursday with a single drawing. Seven crashes later and whole day gone and the drawing is finally useable. Besides the interuptions from my own "bug" problems I have to field the bugs from the users around me. SW is as bad as Anvil was in 1996. And whereas with Anvil I could usually speak to a developer about problems with SW I can only speak to a person at the VAR who takes the problems and starts it down a path with may ot may not preserve the true nature of the problem as it passes down an endless path to "resolution".

About sums up the life cycle of CAD software. I can remember SW97 -
now we're 9 x $1295 dollars later - how far have we got? A better interface and better configuration manipulation and a few teasers like animator, cosmorexpress etc but any quantum leap? BOM is still bolloxs. surfacing is between two stools.
Is there an alternative? Ed hinted at a new CAD software coming out in 18months. I am all ears for alternative quantum leaps forward.
Jonathan

"neil" a écrit dans le message de news: e8p8uq$b6p$ snipped-for-privacy@nntp.aioe.org... Ourselves waited 'till SP4.1 to jump on SW2006, and got burnt. Lots of things randomly not working as they should. I may start a list in a while when I will be sure all that come from the conversion from '04 are gone. Still, here a lot of people are angry, especialy the least patient of us.
BTW, any idea when SP5 is due? our last hope of getting something usable. The general feeling is that we should have sticked to '04.

SW2004 was by far my favorite version (been user since SW96). I held off installing SW2005 for many months, until a coworker convinced me that we should. I wish I had never listened to him. We managed to get by. But it was much slower and had lots of bugs even at SP4.0 when I upgraded. SW2006 has only gotten worse in my opinion.
I too wish I had stuck with SW2004. But once you have committed to an upgrade, you have to bend over and take it whether it feels good or not....

"Seth Renigar" wrote in message news:Y2wsg.6835$ snipped-for-privacy@tornado.southeast.rr.com... We too are in this boat. This is the last time I let the "peanut gallery" talk me into upgrading.
Without a doubt, it's painful! :(

Thanks for your replies. Upon reflection I think I will sit out another round. I am not happy SW have made up any ground and delivered a tool ready for everyday professional use. I am a little surprised that relatively few group visitors have taken the opportunity to voice general dissatisfaction though....seems like a lot of seat warmers out there :o)
Aside from the pervasive bugs the only thing that really gets me down me is dwg performance. This has to be one of those basic architecture failings Nev. Somehow SW was not built with real world dwgs in mind - particularly multi page ones - it is dreadfully frustrating to wait minutes to load and add/change annotations etc. I remember someone posting that they actually export the basic dwg and finish in AutoCAD. If anyone has some ideas how to get decent speed out of dwgs I would really like to hear about them....

My company has been using SW2006. We were happy with 1.0, 2.0 sucked, 3.0 was worse, 3.1 was ok, 4.0 was buggiest, and 4.1 has been resonably solid. We pay the subscription and our VAR has been very helpful.
I personally have been using SW since 2002, and I think that my favorite was 2003. It seemed to be the least buggy, and I was using it in a large user environment and also doing adminsitration for it, as I worked for the college IT dept.
Those are just my opinions, but I think that the change from 2003 to 2006 was worth the problems for the added features. I am not sure when we will upgrade, but probabyl SP1 or maybe 2 at this point.
Pers> Hi folks,

Neil,
I am on 2006, sp4.1. I am forced to stay on the upgrade path because I am a 1-man show and get files from many sources. I need to apply the latest releases when I start to see files that I cannot open.
I think the even-numbered releases are slightly more stable than the odd-numbered ones. I have heard that there are 2 different development teams that run parallel in many areas of the software. I guess my experience would mean that the team responsible for 2004, 2006 is slightly more competent than the other one.
I am modestly satisfied with sp4.1. Cosmetic threads still are unstable and unreliable. I feel that drawing performance is better in 2006 than 2005. This is a gut feel rather than something I have quantified (sorry paul). I work with surfaces and either I am getting better at working with the tools available in SW, or the tools themselves are getting better. Maybe some of both is going on there. I used to think that surface features were less `parametric' than solid features. I think that aspect has improved some in 2006.
I will hold off on 2007 as long as I can. Feeling helpless in the face of exploitation by a large corporation is unpleasant to say the least. I guess one could say that it's all relative: is Pro-E better-or UG? Could the added price for these be justified?? I can't afford to find out, and feel like I am stuck with SW. I never felt that 2005 had a solid sp. I still think the last really good release was 2003. just my 2 cents...........
jk

If you haven't check prices lately you might want to.
Software vendors bank on that. The investment in "figuring it out" will be higher than the the purchase price of the software unless you're buying multiple seats. Add to that the very significant cost of migrating. That's why there's so much of a Cola Wars aspect to CAD software marketing.
Maybe there are some local user groups, college classes, etc. where you can sit and watch the goings on to get a feel for it without investing a lot of time and effort?

That "time" is the four letter word that mucks up the productivity of a one man shop. I know exactly what John is saying, and it applies to me, but I only work on my own models, so I have more flexibility as to whether and when to upgrade.
Bo

I must say that I have always been more than frustrated with the numerous bugs that come with each release. Somehow we have always been able to work around them or just get by. Right now my biggest frustration is that I hear the 80/20 license agreement may come to an end with the release of 2007. Once upon a time we were just switching to 3D and getting along nicely with MDT. A coworker comes back from a trade show gushing about SWX. We knew that Inventor was coming out so we compared Inventor (5 at the time I believe) with SWX 2001. Without knowing that we would be receiving a copy of Inventor as part of our MDT VIP subscription, we chose Solidworks based on its flexible licensing agreement. Due to the size of our business, we rarely used MDT at the same time. When we did overlap it was a huge pain to dump out while the other did what they needed to do. Autodesk absolutely insisted that it be one user at a time, period! Enter Solidworks. If you both aren't using the software at the same time more than 20% of the time, one seat is all you need. Switching from Autodesk to Solidworks was our little way of sticking it to the man. When we hired another engineer, we did the right thing and purchased another seat. We still come nowhere close to overlapping more than 20% of the time. If what I am hearing is true, we may need to get another seat or switch to network licensing. The sad part is that Alibre would do everything we need and more, but who can toss out five years worth of work and change directions now? Nothing like a little strain on the short and curlies!.
Brad

80/20 rule? That's interesting. Sounds like an informal arrangement your reseller dreamed up. I don't see anything in the license agreement about an 80/20 rule, it just says that a user who uses the software 80% of the time it is in use can also install it at home. There is no 20% overlap clause as I read it.

Nice

Well I could somehow work around it or just get by...but I refuse! 2000+ bugs per release is not software of a standard for professionals IMHO :o)

Well I finished my drawing 72 views and 8 sheets later.The actual view count was up to 105 which shows how may views had to be recreated for various reasons. At least two days were lost to crash recovery. Strangely enough saving typically brought on the crashes. I'll have to admit that for a 2D person to create all the section and detail views and get them right would have been a challenge. But SW should be able to do better than this.
The areas where SW really fell down where:
Sections of sections where the first section's alignment was broken with the parent. Sections going bad for no apparent reason. Hatching consistency Updating cropped views Random lines appearing on the screen but not on printouts. The drawing making changes or hanging onto out of date data from the underlying assembly Having trouble updating configuration information even thought the underlying assembly was already updated. Inconsistent performance. Sometimes acceptably fast and sometimes not. Inconsistent behavior of extension line attachments Items sometimes moving on there own (like aligned detail views). Increased instability after doing a replace operation on a key subassembly. Not displaying the detail view letters in the feature tree.
And one or two part related problems like: Not completely rebuilding and assembly to where the assembly cut feature had to be opened and closed when SW forgot about it in the drawing. Forgeting which surface to extrude up to in a key part.
That's all that come to mind now. There was no point in turning these in. It would have taken another week just to document them.
As much as I like putting together assemblies and making parts, drawings still get me down. And in the end I think the drawing turned out OK. We'll see.

Can you give me any insight as to how SW works internally re dwgs? Somehow to me the whole thing is just very inefficient and consequently frustrating to use. It seems like the whole of the SW data has to be accessed, checked and reworked each time even just to do quite simple things. I can't see why this needs to be so deep. A lot of what I want to do could be just a 2d overlay whose position and scale is linked to the model views position and scale. Couldn't I have the option to disconnect from the 3d data or have it suspended for a major rebuild later? - a bit like the old red light utility... I really just want to get in there set up some views on some sheets, add a whole bunch of notes or whatever and get out. This should be able to be done really quickly but in practice as you note it takes ages and there are always some things going pear shaped :o(