Hi everybody, Could someone please tell me if there is a huge difference between Solidworks 2003 and Solidworks 2004 BETA. I heard that the SW2004BETA is already out on their website. I think its on 2 CD's worth of download. Is it worth trying out the SW2004BETA? Or should we wait till the full real Non-beta release comes out in 2004 sometimes.
Yes there is!
If any of these improvements sound worthy of trying out, you shall have your answer. Here are a few of my favorites, in no particular order...
Limit Mates Gear Mates Conical Mates Deform Feature Automatic Ballooning Parametric Hole Tables New BOM WITHOUT EXCEL Other BOM Improvements New Mold Tools Lightweight Drawings Awesome Weldment Design Tools Major Eye Candy Bells and Whistles for the UI Save-as PDF Associative Fit Spline Draggable Guide Curves for Lofts Sweep Improvements Extrude Along Vector Materials Selector Hole Wizard Improvements Easy Assemblies from Multibodies Dissolve Component Patterns In-Context Improvements Change Rapid Draft back to Regular Drawing Save eDrawing as ZIP File PhotoWorks 2 Task Scheduler Customized Menus Printing Improvements Variable Radius for Surfaces Knitting and Other Surfacing Improvements Extrude a 3D Sketch TONS of New Command Buttons Custom Property Improvements (Example: You no longer have to hit the "Modify" button!) Improved Memory Allocation Add Triangles (with numbers) to Notes (woohoo!) Layers in Blocks New Revision Tables Section View Improvements Custom Dual Units Improved Sketching and Dimensioning Shell Diagnostics
and so-forth and so-on...
Mike Wilson "One step closer to the Killer App"
Jeff N quipped:
i agree...because so far the PR of 2004 is really unstable.
NLOL.
--nick e.
Yeah, I have been thinking a lot about stability lately. I have not used the pre-release, but have not been impressed with stability of SW03; `any' sp. (maybe 3.1 was the best one.) I was talking to my VAR last week and he said that 03 had so many new features that stability may have suffered. He assured me that these had all been solved in 04. Now I read that 04 has tons of new features. At what price to stability?? When are the marketing wizards who control SWX going to give development time to consolidate everything and focus on getting us back to a solid and stable platform????
Coincidently, SW2004 sp0 was released today but there isn't a fix list published yet so we'll have to see what's fixed/broken.
I agree though that there are a lot of new features that seem like they will save a lot of time for assembly drawings, multiple configurations bom's, and weldments. I am hoping I don't have to wait to SP4 to implement.
Never mind all that stuff - have they stopped folders and things in the feature manager from 'auto-expanding' themselves at any given opportunity? That, for me, would be enough to justify a new SW release. {:O))
Keith
Is anybody having problems installing Sp0. It keeps on asking english_i386_SolidWorks.msi file for sw2004 pre-release
thx SS
Keith Kerwin quipped:
oh come now.
do you really think they'd fix that?
it still pulls that crap.
just like with 01+: the HUGE new LOOK EVERYBODY feature-->SKINS!!! But custom skins don't work. it keeps resetting any time you go to edit the doc properties. even with SP6.0 it never worked right in 01+.
-nick e.
tho it does seem they've fixed the problem with toolbar buttons randomly greying out....
dks quipped:
wait for the CD. they still haven't figured out a way to let you install a SP after you install the d/l version. so you need to uninstall the d/l version and install from the CD if you ever want to upgrade(sic).
Note: If you want to update this installation of Service Pack 0 to a subsequent service pack (e.g.: SP1) you must uninstall Service Pack 0 and reinstall it from CD before applying the subsequent service pack.
fscking brilliant.
i am almost scared to see how bad it is. Considering how much PR2 crashes, I feel there should have been at least a PR3.
on the bright side, now I can start harassing my VAR about all the crashes and bugs!! they love me. :)
-nick e.
p.s. one cool new feature that i just found: you can now edit the sketch plane of hole wizard holes!!
Mike,
Good to hear from you again. Like you I live and die with splines and surfaces. The improvements in 2004 in these areas alone are worth a few trials and tribulations. I assume "who needs this crap" from another poster was joke. Do I need 2004, perhaps not, but I want it and I going to use it? A better analogy: I need beer, I want Guinness.
Bill Bredlow quipped:
not quite.
it's more like starting the guiness, thoroughly enjoying it, then halfway thru realizing that it has a bacterial growth, whereupon you become violently ill, heaving your guts out. When you recover, rather than getting a different beer--a nut brown ale, or a nice doppel bock for instance--you return to the guiness because you enjoy the taste of it. Never mind the fact that you vomit profusely after every 4 or 5 sips.
ie: i really don't like the fact that 2004 consistently crashes on simple operations. like opening and editing parts. or editing mates.
you may want to deal with that. i don't.
regards, nick e.
"Nick E." wrote in news:jrecnVWb0Ot68MOiXTWc- snipped-for-privacy@speakeasy.net:
If this is happening to you, I suggest that you might want to take a look at your set up, probably a messy install. I worked with beta for weeks and only had 1 unexplained crash and 2 repeatable crashes. It's a little too easy to point the finger at the software without verifying the source of the problem. Such an obvious problem is not likely something as simple as an oversight, and I although I doubt they sent you a special version of the software, I guess anything's possible. Please post your data that consistantly crashes, let a few of us verify it and I'll eat sand.
matt.
matt quipped:
uninstalled PR (with AV off). reboot. installed 0.0 (AV off). reboot. Run SW. crash at some point during the day. had this problem since PR1 came out. it's even installed on a diferent partition than sw2001+. win2k/SP2. i KNOW how to install shit.
ok. granted. odds are 50/50 that it's actually a MS problem.
post which data?
--nick e.
I think he means post some specifics about what you were doing when it crashed. What kinds of files were you working on? Is/are the crashes repeatable? What kind of things do you design - lots of swoopy stuff or prismatic? How about some systems specs?
Richard
Matt,
I was part of beta as well and had similar experience to your's. I found it to be quit stable. I do fairly complex mechanical assemblies of 1200 parts or less.
Dave H
Beware for those doing advanced modeling in 2004, there are still a lot of problems and some of them are regression bugs. For instance, The Split command, when regenerating in a large multi-body part will fail if a part that is show that does not need to be split, and is not checked, will be split anyway. I assume that this came back to haunt us because of "save bodies" and "save assemblies". In some case, Sweeps and Lofts are still not holding accuracy at the edges of external faces and knit will complete even with small gaps. I've been developing a remote control for the last 3 months on 2004 (yeah, call me crazy). I'm going to be addressing these issues soon with Concord, using this project.
Have you also notices some really bad ones like cutting with a surface causes a CTD. I haven't installed SP0 so I don't know if these have been addressed, but I doubt it. So, there it is; proceed with caution.
Got to run.
Mark
I have had almost no stability problems on 2004-pre and on Rel 0, running on two machines. One crash only, and as often happens with me, it occurs when I have lots of large assemblies loaded and lots of paging occurs. When I have had instabilities I may have stupidly left the virus auto-protect on during install. Otherwise, a true, clean install with registry purge has usually fixed things. Cheers bob
"Awesome Weldment Design Tools" ??????
I saw a demo/seminar yesterday on the weldment functionality of SW2004. Not bad for a first release of a new feature, but it still has a long way to go before it becomes a real world working tool. I don't see myself using what I saw and plan on creating individual parts for my weldments. At least I'll be able to control the things that the new weldment tools do not encompass. I only saw the fillet weld used and at best in a limited fashion. The inability to use curved surfaces to associate structural members and welds to is not acceptable, all structural steel tubing and channels have bend radiuses and rounds or fillets. The cutlist did seem helpful. Also, shouldn't all the structural shape data be pre-defined, we were told we could type in the dimensions for anything structural shape not shown (only three were).
Keith
PS If I'm > > Could someone please tell me if there is a huge difference between
Richard Doyle quipped:
smallish assembly. 400-500 parts or so. they're all blocks. and sheet metal with simple bends. nothing swooshie or stuff like that. nothing special or complex.
repeatable? not really. but it's always a simple operation.
i have just upgraded(sic) to Sp3 on win2k, so we'll see if that helps.
thx, nick e.
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