SWks 2006 SP1 Usability?

I thought SP0.0 was safe... SP1.0 is safe IMO too. There have been some bugs reported... but that is nothing new IMO.

Regards,

It isn't just an issue of safe. Have you retrained yourself to take advantage of what's new and changed? In doing so you will probably answer the first question.

No training.

I don't waste my time with a new release until it seems like the problems have been reduced to where most work can go on without any significant problems. It took me until SP4 in SWks 2005 before I would switch.

Once it seems like it is good to switch, I'll put in the time checking out features and new items of note. It is so time consuming to get any significant new release up to speed, that I certainly don't want to start and stop, and then start again 4 months later.

So you plan to drop SW2006?

I don't quite understand "So you plan to drop SW2006?".

I just want to get a feel for whether SWks 2006 is now operable without significant 'restrictions', so that I can make a guess as to whether I should consider making the move now.

There is no exact way for a non-user to understand a new release without spending time on it, yet hopefully the collective wisdom of the online group can give enough clues to make a decent guess, before plowing ahead.

The whole question of "when should upgrade" has always baffeled me.

"when I have my screensaver set to XXX, and I try to use font XXX for a word document, while having XXX program minimised, Solidworks crashes". If there was a problem with overall stability on a sp0 release, there would be an issue. It seems the general bar out there is to wait for the first major sp to be released. For SW2005 SP1.0 wasnt released until Feb of 2005. For SW2006, it came out in Oct. I didnt see any restrictions in SW2006 SP0 let alone SP1.0 . Go thru the Whats New section to see the changes as there are a number of improvements. To me one of the challenges of using SW are discoveing and implementing the yearly changes. As far as stability goes, I think most user problems can be attributed to hardware problems. The release of a

64-Bit Beta version combined with the announcement of only supporting Windows XP for Sw2007, should be a hint on the direction SW if heading. I would say concentrate on keeping your workstation upto date, and just putting up with the little SW quirks that are there. How many versions has the selection error been present now? (the one where SW just goes ahead and de-selects some of the selection otpions for us!)

If you plan to drop SW2006 then why bother learning it? If you plan to use it eventually, which I think you do, and if you want to hit the ground running as opposed to learning it on the fly then why not spend time in it before you roll it out. I have spent a lot of time with 2006 and know there is a lot to learn/relearn in order to use it. In the process of learing 2006 you should be able to answer a lot of questions specific to your implementation and then add the group wisdom to that. If you depend solely on the group and not on your own testing/use you may miss something.

I generally find problems about every ten minutes just puttering around with new functionality in a new release, and 2006 is not excepted from that.

I plan to load up a separate hard drive with Swks 2006 at probably SP1 sometime this month, so I can start learning it with it separated from my 'normal' work.

This way I don't disrupt anything else I'm doing or wind up with converted files which I can't revert back to SWks 2005 if I need them there to work on them.

If I'm going to attend SolidWorks world, I'm going to want to be on

2006 by then.

Bo

Two of my colleagues are running SW06 now, as they start work on a new project. One is on SP0 and one is on SP1. Both are seeing a lot more crashes than they were having with SW04 (we skipped SW05). It's possible that the crashes are more due to the work they are doing now (lots of surfaces), rather than the new software, but the crashes don't seem to be related to specific actions. They also have had problems with being unable to pick on screen and having sketch entities disappear, so maybe SW06 is pushing the graphics cards beyond their safe operating envelope.

They haven't done anything with drawings yet, so I can't comment on the problems that others have seen with SP1.

Jerry Steiger Tripod Data Systems "take the garbage out, dear"

I think I'll put SWks 2006 on its own hard drive, and play it 100% safe.

Bo

The shame of this is that half your subscription runs out before you can install the next version in production. When 2006 came out, I think the VARs would pass on 2005 problems saying they were now supporting

2006. But I'm glad you will get up to speed on 2006. There are some features that will be of help to some, but little that will be of help to all.

I've been using 2006 SP0 for some time and it has been a huge improvement for me on 2005 SP4. I haven't noticed hardly any instability issues with it yet. Initially it took a while to open documents from PDM works, but now most of these documents have been converted, and things seem to run fine. Re Usability: There are now heaps of cool features for annotations and dimension that were not available in 2005. These improvements alone are worth switching for. We will be coordinating the upgrade to SP1 shortly. I think in the past, definitley prior to SW 2004, the first release was definitely problematic, but I think enough work has been done on the CAD engine now that users don't need to worry too much about the software performance. Now I'm just hanging out for expanded functionality in future releases.

I think the SolidWorks management team has been listening hard to prior years complaints about paying the maintenance fee and then customers having to wait 6 months or so before stability is achieved before they can upgrade.

It seems like this year for the first time I recall, a yearly release will be ready for prime time on January 1.

That is a milestone I would like to see repeated as a rule.

Bo