SW2008

Along these lines, I recently thinstalled SW2007, completly USB portable and only about 300mb, all help and addin's ripped. With everything, it's a lot bigger. Just playing around with this, it could be useful to have a few SW versions; all are independant and can be run simultaneously with no problems, independent virtually registries and file structures created at runtime (files save to real hard drive or USB). Its a neat program

on the website they show demos of the MS Office suite thinstalled, running of off USB, licensing, services, everything needed is run with the program, don't know how it works, I tested it with SW2007 and SW works fine on a clean machine, just by running the 300mb exe file, it only takes a few seconds more to start up, but runs just fine.

One other suggestion is to use a virtual machine, Microsoft Virtual PC

2007 is FREE from microsoft, download it, about 30mb, create a virtual PC, install xp, on it, it uses all your hardware, same everything, put in 2008 and install it, test it out, you can switch back and forth between virtual PC and real PC with no problem and discard change to the Virtual PC if you don't like changes you have made since the last bootup. Use it to test anything you are unsure off. You can drag and drop files between PC's and share the Virtual Harddrive on a network.

Yes you can install 2008 along with 2007. Just make sure that you back up your common parts/files before using 2008. The other thing to do is to change the file locations of these file in 2008 as well. When you install 2008 it will assume file locations and settings from your current version that is installed so you have a potential for overwriting 2007 files and once they have been saved in 2008 you can't use them in 2007.

you sure can. We typically always keep the older version on hand just as a safety precaution in case there is an issue with a file on a new version. It's kind of a murphy's law situation. If we uninstall the old version and replace with the new... you are doomed to have major issues. However, we find keeping the older version installed, we never have to use it.

anyways with that, I suggest you change a couple things durring the installation options. When you get to the dialog box with the program install directory and the common files directory, change them to be version specific.

For example for 2008 we would do this.

default for program files \Solidworks -----> \Solidworks 2008\

default for common files \Solidworks Data ------> \Solidworks 2008 Data

This separates the info needed for each installation clarifies which one you are using.

Don

Thanks! How does this effect my licensing/authorization? Obviously I don't want to deactivate SW2007. Do I need to do anything for this?

TIA,

Joseph

I'd also suggest installing each version of SolidWorks in a dedicated directory which, for example, can be named SolidWorks 2006, SolidWorks

2007, SolidWorks 2008 and so on.

If multiple versi> you sure can. We typically always keep the older version on hand just

One other word of caution is if you use Toolbox, place these files in a separate folder from your 2007 installation as it will overwrite any part files with new 2008 versions and will then make them non usable for

2007.

No, unless something has changed in SW2008. My coworker didn't mention any such problem when he installed SW2008, so you should be good to go, so long as you follow the advice about keeping the installations separate.

Jerry Steiger